By Keaton Kroos
Student Writer
Halloween is a day that Americans adore, but how many of us know why this holiday that we love so much started?
I was very interested to learn how the history of Halloween had come about, so I looked into it.
Actually, weird enough, it isn’t just one thing that contributed to the holiday we tend to love so much.
The first contributor is a day that Pagans used to celebrate to signify that the days were turning from mostly warm sunny days, to cold longer nights.
When they were celebrating this holiday, they would often have bonfires, these bonfires would attract bugs and, with bugs, bats. This is how bats came to be a part of Halloween.
Another holiday started May 13th called All Saint’s Day. This season had such a success that they moved the holiday to the first of November. They called this day All Hallows Day, the next part is that the day before, October 31st,they called All Hallows Eve, then Hallows eve, and afterward Halloween.
On Hallows day, it was common for people to go to the graves of the dead relatives and give them milk or little cakes to keep them from haunting us, just like zombies or ghosts. This is where we got those customs.
Okay, so you still might be wondering why little kids and young adults go up to random strangers’ houses for candy, because I for sure wondered why.
Well, you see, Pagans and Catholics believed that there was a place that we go to after death and this place is called Purgatory (a fiery place that you do not want to go to chill.)
The way that it was believed to leave this place was with the prayers of multiple people. So a tradition started for beggars. Beggars would go up to homes and ask for foods, and in return they would pray for the deceased of someone the giver knew. The most common “goodie” was a cake called a soul cake.
November 5, 1605, Guide Fawkes tries to blow up the House of Lords in London. Key word: “tries.” Well you see, he was caught in the act and ends up dying a shameful and painful death, but we won’t go into too much detail about that.
After this, it was a yearly event for the town kids made fun of him by wearing masks around the town and bothering people, pretty much being pesky kids like we are now-a-days. I bet most of us can relate to this. (Heck, most of us could name a few people we know like this.)
You might be thinking, “okay, this is interesting, but this is a few days too short, and this is true, but are you ever so excited about an event that is going to happen later in a week except you have so much energy that you have to use it in any way possible? Well that is what these people did! They let out this energy on October 31st and after a while November 5th lost its popularity.
This is all stuff that people went through, and I bet you that none of those people ever thought that they would become a part of history. You never know you might become history and it would be nice for people to find you interesting.