8/10/2019 Handout Halloween Corpse Bride and Coraline
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Class ______________ October 2014
Name______________
HISTORY OF HALLOWEEN
Most people think of Halloween today as simply a day when
children dress up in costumes and gofrom home to home to trick or
treat and collect enough candy to make any parent cringe. Halloween
wasmuch more significant in ancient times, however. October 31st
was a very important day to the ancientCelts of Ireland, Scotland
and Great Britain. No kidding around in costumes and trick or treat
bags;
Halloween was much more serious to the non-Christian Cults a
thousand years ago.Halloween remains a popular day in the U.S.,
Canada, Puerto Rico, Ireland, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.
Children get to dress up
in their favorite costumes and ring doorbells throughout their
neighborhood to collect as much candy as possible. In the United
States' Halloween is thesecond most popular holiday (after
Christmas) for decorating and reaps a huge financial bounty of
retail selling of frightening costumes to children andadults alike,
decorations and candy. But for eons, the history of Halloween
encompased ancient beliefs about the world both living and
dead.
Halloween originated among the Irish Celts, Scots and
Anglo-Saxons in Britain long before the Christian era. Originally
called Samhain, it wasa time when they believed the division
between the worlds of the living and the dead became very thin and
when ghosts and spirits were free to wanderas they wished. The name
Halloween is a shorter form for the Gaelic name All
-hallow-evening. Pope Boniface IV instituted All Saints' Day in the
7th
century as a time to honor saints and martyrs, replacing the
pagan festival of the dead. In 834, Gregory III moved All Saint's
Day to Nov. 1, thusmaking Oct. 31 All Hallows' Eve ('hallow' means
'saint').
On the night of Samhain, it was believed spirits of the restless
dead and mischievous spirits would freely roam about with humans
and duringthis one night spirits were able to make contact with the
physical world as their magic was at its height. The Celts believed
that by allowing the deadto have access to the world on this one
evening, they would be satisfied to return to the land of the dead.
The Celtic people would put out foodofferings to appease the
spirits who might inflict suffering and violence on them and Celtic
priests would offer sacrifices, animal and human, to the godsfor
the purpose of chasing away the evil, frightening spirits. They
built fires where they gave sacrifices to the Celtic deit ies to
ensure protection fromthe dead spirits. Samhain was also a time
when it was customary for the pagans to use the occult practice of
divination to determine the weather for thecoming year, the crop
expectations, and even who in the community would marry whom and in
what order.
When Rome took over their land, the Samhain was integrated with
two other Roman festivals: Feralia and a festival to honor Pomona,
theRoman goddess of fruit and trees. By the time Christianity come
on the scene, Halloween had already taken root from the pagan
beliefs and wasintegrated into Christian practices. As the
Europeans found their way to the New World, they brought with them
their traditions which soon evolved tofit their new country.
Many customs still observed today come from these ancient
beliefs. For example, the elaborately carved jack-o-lantern is said
to have beennamed after the Irish story of a greedy, hard-drinking
gambling man, Stingy Jack, who tricked the Devil into climbing a
tree and trapped him there bycarving a crude cross into the trunk
of the tree. In revenge for being stuck in the tree, the Devil
cursed Jack and made him walk the earth at night foreternity. The
jack-o-lantern of today is carved with a scary face to keep Jack
and other spirits from entering their homes.
A problem for the Celtic people was... if the souls of dead
loved ones could return that night, so could anything else, human
or not, nice ornot-so-nice. So, to protect themselves on such an
occasion, these superstitious people would masquerade as one of the
demonic hoard, wearing masksand other disguises and blackening the
face with soot to hopefully blend in unnoticed among them. This is
the source of modern day Halloween costumesportraying devils, imps,
ogres, and other demonic creatures.
1. Answer the questions below:
a. When do we celebrate
Halloween?_________________________________________________________________________
b. Was Halloween given a greater importance in the past?
How?
_________________________________________________________________________c.
Where is Halloween most
popular?_________________________________________________________________________
d. Where does the name Halloween come from and how was this
holiday originally
called?_________________________________________________________________________
http://www.thebestholiday.com/halloween/http://www.thebestholiday.com/halloween/
