Yes it’s that time of year again….stock up with candy, sharpen your best pumpkin-carving knife and straighten out your witch’s hat. Halloween is here.Although the UK and the USA tend to get Halloween-mania as the end of October rolls around, a lot of countries don’t tend to celebrate the event. Hungary is one of these countries and tends to focus more upon the All Saints’ official holiday which takes place on November 1st. So for those of you who don’t know as much as you’d like to about this spooky night, read on (at your peril).
Halloween is a shortened version of All Hallows’ Even, meaning the eve of All Saints Day. The origins of the day lie in an ancient Celtic festival known as Samhain; marking the end of the festival season in Gaelic culture. Spookily, the ancient Gaels believed that on October 31st the boundary between the alive and the dead vanished, meaning that spirits plagued the living with illness and destroyed their crops. To combat this, bonfires were built and the bones of slaughtered animals thrown in. Costumes and masks were also worn in an attempt to mimic the evil spirits and thus placate them. So next time you see someone wearing a ghostly white sheet on Halloween, don’t laugh, they’re the smart ones.
But don’t go rummaging through your bin for animal bones just yet. Nowadays Halloween is celebrated in far less smelly ways. Trick or treating is probably the most popular Halloween activity amongst kids. And the practice goes back a long way –to the middle ages in fact, to when poor people would go from door to door on All Saints Day in a practice known as “souling”, which involved begging for food in return for prayers for the dead.
Other traditional Halloween activities include ghost tours, apple-bobbing, bonfires, costume parties (for a perfect example – come to Funzine’s Fright Night), visiting haunted houses, carvingJack-o’-lanterns (pumpkins) and watching horror movies.
So what are you waiting for? Get your pumpkin and mask at the ready…or who knows what might happen….
Here are some haunting facts about Halloween:
- – Orange and black are Halloween colors because orange is associated with harvests and black is associated with death.
- – Black cats were thought to enhance a witch’s power by warding off negative forces.
- – To meet a witch, put your clothes on inside-out and walk backwards on Halloween night.
- – Ringing a bell scares evil spirits away.
- – The world’s biggest pumpkin weighed in at an enormous 1,446 pounds at a pumpkin festival in Canada.