Halloween Chills and Thrills
Pumpkins, gory costumes, spiders and E-numbered-up kids hammering on your door. Are you ready for this year’s Halloween-fest? The supermarkets have been since the last Bank Holiday in August, so what’s it all about?
Many people exist quite happily without ever acknowledging Halloween. However, most of us surround ourselves with spooks, ghouls, demons, magic and spells, wizards and witches and the living dead every year because of an ancient pagan festival called Samhain and All Saints’ Day from the Christian calendar.
While we are munching on pumpkin pie and bobbing apples dressed as zombies we may want to remember the Celts who 2,000 years ago would have been throwing the bones of slaughtered livestock onto bonfires and wearing masks in order to calm evil spirits. This festival traditionally celebrated the end of harvest time and the beginning of the Celtic New Year on November 1.
In later years the Christian church began marking All Saints’ Day at the same time of year. Their belief was that souls were released from purgatory on All Hallow’s Eve, the night before All Saints’ Day, for 48 hours. This was parallel to the pagan belief that the spirits of the dead could spill into the land of the living on this particular night.
Over time, ideas from both festivals merged and became known as Hallowe’en in mainstream culture. The pagan and Christian religions continue to celebrate with their own separate events too.
Halloween is marked around the world in similar form, from Mexico’s Day of the Dead to China’s Ghost Festival, and increasingly as a result of the influence of American culture in areas such as Australia, New Zealand, Japan and