Halloween is
a holiday celebrated on the night of October 31. The word Halloween is a
shortening of All Hallows' Evening also known as Hallowe'en or All Hallows'
Eve.
Traditional activities include trick-or-treating, bonfires, costume parties, visiting "haunted houses" and carving jack-o-lanterns. Irish and Scottish immigrants carried versions of the tradition to North America in the nineteenth century. Other western countries embraced the holiday in the late twentieth century including Ireland, the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico and the United Kingdom as well as of Australia and New Zealand.
Traditional activities include trick-or-treating, bonfires, costume parties, visiting "haunted houses" and carving jack-o-lanterns. Irish and Scottish immigrants carried versions of the tradition to North America in the nineteenth century. Other western countries embraced the holiday in the late twentieth century including Ireland, the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico and the United Kingdom as well as of Australia and New Zealand.
Halloween
has its origins in the ancient Celtic festival known as Samhain (pronounced
"sah-win").
The activity is popular in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, and due to increased American cultural influence in recent years, imported through exposure to US television and other media, trick-or-treating has started to occur among children in many parts of Europe, and in the Saudi Aramco camps of Dhahran, Akaria compounds and Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia.
The most
significant growth and resistance is in the United Kingdom, where the police
have threatened to prosecute parents who allow their children to carry out the
"trick" element. In continental Europe, where the commerce-driven
importation of Halloween is seen with more skepticism, numerous destructive or
illegal "tricks" and police warnings have further raised suspicion
about this game and Halloween in general.
In Ohio,
Iowa, and Massachusetts, the night designated for Trick-or-treating is often
referred to as Beggars Night.
Part of the
history of Halloween is Halloween costumes. The practice of dressing up
in costumes and begging door to door for treats on holidays goes back to the
Middle Ages, and includes Christmas wassailing. Trick-or-treating resembles the
late medieval practice of "souling," when poor folk would go door to
door on Hallowmas (November 1), receiving food in return for prayers for the
dead on All Souls Day (November 2).
It
originated in Ireland and Britain, although similar practices for the souls of
the dead were found as far south as Italy. Shakespeare mentions the practice in
his comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1593), when Speed accuses his master of
"puling [whimpering, whining], like a beggar at Hallowmas."
The
thousands of Halloween postcards produced between the turn of the 20th century
and the 1920s commonly show children but do not depict trick-or-treating. Ruth
Edna Kelley, in her 1919 history of the holiday, The Book of Hallowe'en, makes
no mention of such a custom in the chapter "Hallowe'en in America."
It does not seem to have become a widespread practice until the 1930s, with the
earliest known uses in print of the term "trick or treat" appearing
in 1934, and the first use in a national publication occurring in 1939.
Although
some popular histories of Halloween have characterized trick-or-treating as an
adult invention to re-channel Halloween activities away from vandalism, nothing
in the historical record supports this theory.
To the
contrary, adults, as reported in newspapers from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s,
typically saw it as a form of extortion, with reactions ranging from bemused
indulgence to anger. Likewise, as portrayed on radio shows, children would have
to explain what trick-or-treating was to puzzled adults, and not the other way
around.
Sometimes
even the children protested: for Halloween 1948, members of the Madison Square
Boys Club in New York City carried a parade banner that read "American
Boys Don't Beg."
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