Halloween? It's more than trick or treat

Facts from the original

• Halloween is the modern English name for a great northern European festival marking the end of the warm, light half of the year and the start of winter.
• It was known in Irish as Samhain, meaning summer's end.
• It was known in Welsh as Nos Galan Gaeaf, meaning winter's eve.
• It was known in Anglo-Saxon as Blodmonath, meaning blood month.
• It was known in Norse as the winter nights.
• It was one of the greatest religious festivals of the ancient northern pagan year.
• We have virtually no idea what rites were celebrated, because northern European pagans were illiterate and no record of their ceremonies remains.
• The Anglo-Saxon name reflects the agricultural need to slaughter surplus livestock and salt down the meat, since the animals could not be fed through winter.
• The Christian monk Bede commented that the animals were dedicated to the gods when killed, but he appeared not to know how, and they were still eaten.
• Some associations of the ancient festival can be reconstructed from medieval continuations and widespread folk customs.
• Positioned on a major boundary of the year, Halloween faced in two directions.
• In one sense it was a time of plenty and homecoming, after the bountiful summer and autumn.
• Warriors, traders, sailors and skilled people had returned, the harvest was in the barns, and flocks and herds were driven in from summer pastures and outfields.
• It was a time for reunions, stories, celebrations, settling disputes, taking stock, learning lessons for the next year, and relaxation.
• In medieval Ireland local kings were said to hold a feast at their royal halls for a week before and after Samhain.
• Its other face was that it ushered in winter, the most frightening, uncomfortable and inconvenient season in the northlands.
• In modern Britain it is when clocks change and night rushes into the afternoon.
• The feast prefaced months of darkness, cold, hunger, claustrophobia and consequent physical illness.
• What was coming was the season of death, of leaves, flowers and light, and of humans, since more died in winter and early spring than at any other time.
• Halloween was widely regarded as the time when spirits of darkness and fear, the evil and malevolent forces of nature, were let loose on earth.
• People reacted in two ways, one being to make it the festival of divination par excellence, most often predicting who would live through the winter.
• The other reaction was to mock darkness and fear, singing songs about spirits such as the Welsh tail-less black sow and the White Lady, or dressing up as them.
• It is commonly asserted the feast was the pagan festival of the dead, but ancient European feasts commemorating the dead were celebrated by pagans and early Christians between March and May.
• The medieval Catholic church gradually instituted a mighty festival of the dead at this time of year.
• 1 November was designated the feast of All Saints or All Hallows, initially in honour of early Christian martyrs.
• 2 November was All Souls, when people could pray for dead friends and relatives.
• This was associated with the new doctrine of purgatory, a place of suffering between hell and heaven where sins were purged to fit people for heaven.
• It was believed the prayers of the living could lighten and shorten their trials, as could the intercession of saints.
• The two new Christian feasts were developed between the ninth and twelfth centuries and started in Germanic, not Celtic, lands.
• The Protestant reformation did away with the doctrine of purgatory and the cult of saints, removing these rites from most of Britain and leaving only a vague sense of Halloween as creepy.
• Halloween survived in its old form in Ireland, both as the Catholic feast of saints and souls and a great seasonal festival.
• Massive Irish emigration to America in the 19th century took it over there.
• In the 20th century it developed into a national festivity for Americans, retaining dressing up to mock the powers of dark, cold and death.
• A transforming custom had poor people going door to door to beg food for their own feast, morphing into the children's custom of trick or treat.
• By the 1980s some American evangelical Christians condemned the festival as a glorification of the powers of evil, missing its historical associations.
• Both the celebrations and the condemnations spilled over to Britain.
• On the whole the ancient feast of Winter's Eve has regained its ancient character as a dual time of fun and festivity and of confronting life's fears and discomforts, embodied in northern latitudes by cold and dark.