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The Celtic festival of Samhain is probably the source of the
present-day Halloween celebration. The Celts lived more than 2,000
years ago in Britain, Ireland, and northern France. Their new year
began on November 1. A festival that began the previous evening
honored Samhain, the Celtic lord of death. The celebration marked
the beginning of the season of cold, darkness, and decay and was
associated with human death. The Celts believed that Samhain
allowed the souls of the dead to return to their earthly homes for
this evening.
On the evening of the festival,
the Druids, who were the priests and teachers of the Celts,
ordered the people to put out their hearth fires. The Druids built
a huge new year's bonfire of oak branches, which they considered
sacred. They burned animals, crops, and possibly even human beings
as sacrifices. Then each family relit its hearth fire from the new
year's fire. During the celebration, people sometimes wore
costumes made of animal heads and skins. They told fortunes about
the coming year by examining the remains of the animals that had
been sacrificed.
Portions of the Celtic holiday of the dead eventually passed into
Christian culture after the Romans conquered the Celts and tried
to bring the Celts into the "Christian fold." It eventually became
apparent to the church leaders that the Celts, in spite of their
conformation to some aspects of Christian culture, were stubbornly
sticking with elements of their old religion.
So, in the seventh century AD, the church moved its All Saints'
Day, a holiday for honoring early Christian martyrs, from a day in
May to November 1, thus associating it with the old Druid death
rituals of October 31. By the tenth century A.D., the Catholic
Church had modified it to All Souls' Day to honor all the past
Saints who couldn't be accommodated in the calendar.
Halloween came to America with early Irish and Scottish
immigrants. By then, though, it had a become just a fun
celebration: a night of making jack o' lanterns, playing trick or
treats, and telling ghost stories around a bonfire. It was already
changing into the holiday for children with which we in the 20th
century are so familiar.
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