Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - A History of Halloween

Episode Date: October 31, 2020

On October 31 every year, we celebrate Halloween. It is especially popular in the United States where we use the holiday as an excuse for kids to dress up and ask for candy, and for adults to dress up and drink. But why do we dress up, and what’s the deal with pumpkins, how does this have anything to do with monsters and bats? Learn more about the history of Halloween and how so many unrelated things got lumped together on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On October 31st every year, we celebrate Halloween. It is especially popular in the United States, where we use the holiday as an excuse for kids to dress up and ask for candy, and for adults to dress up and drink. But why do we dress up? And what's the deal with pumpkins? And what does this have anything to do with witches? Learn more about the history of Halloween and how so many unrelated things got lumped together on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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then come join me for a long walk through the trenches and battlefields of World War I. We dive into the details of how and why these battles unfolded and happened as they did. In telling the narrative of these clashes, we can revisit the stories of the men and women who lived, fought, and died during the first Titanic struggle of the 20th century. For these people have stories that deserve to be told. So join us wherever you download your podcasts. As with pretty much every holiday, the origins of Halloween have an ancient past. The first thing to address in understanding the holiday would be the word Halloween itself. November 1st is the Catholic Holy Day of All Saints Day, which, as the name

implies, honors all the saints. The older English term for the day was All Hallows Day, or Hallow Mass. The day after All Saints Day is All Souls Day. Correspondingly, the day before All Hallows Day is All Hallows Eve, and the celebration of All Hallows Day would have begun after sunset on All Hallows Eve. Halloween basically means Saints' evening, with the Eam part coming from a truncated word in Scots for evening. The collection of Hallows Eve, Hallows Day, and All Souls Day were collectively known as All Hallowtide. The first actual use of the word Halloween was from 1775. Many of the traditions surrounding this holiday date back to the Celtic Pagan Festival of Sahuin.

Sawin was celebrated on November 1st, with, just like All Saints Day, a celebration starting the night before. Sawin was the end of the harvest season and the start of the winter, and the biggest celebration in the Celtic calendar. As Christianity spread, the explicit pagan celebration went away, but the traditions and customs remained and were adapted to the Christian celebrations which occurred at the same time. Many of the traditions of Halloween in England fell by the wayside as Guy Fawkes Day on November 5th became more popular. However, Halloween remained popular in Scotland and Ireland. Very early colonists to the Americas brought the traditions of All Saints Day and Halloween with them. Anglican and Catholic settlers both celebrated the holiday, but the Puritans up in New England did not, as they were generally against everything.

It was still a pretty minor holiday up until the mass migration of Irish to the United States in the 19th century. It was then that the holiday really took off and adopted many of the unique American attributes. Because the topic of Halloween is so broad and has so many different traditions, let's look at several of them individually to see where they came from. Wearing costumes and trick-or-treating. I'm lumping these two things together because they're so intertwined that it's hard to talk about one without the other. One of the features of the pagan Sowin Festival was the lighting of massive bonfires and also dressing up in the skins of animals.

This is believed to be the earliest origins of the tradition of wearing costumes. At least as early as the 16th century, the practice of mumming and guising was recorded. This was dressing up in costume and going door to door to ask for food. Mumming was practiced all over Europe and for many other festivals, including Shrove Tuesday, Epiphany Eve, and Christmas. While this was a very early form of trick-or-treating, it was actually more like Christmas caroling, as the people in costumes would usually recite Bible verses, sing hymns, or put on a very short play. in exchange for small portions of food. The dressing up as ghosts, ghouls, witches, and monsters ties into the All Saints Day and celebrations of the dead aspect of the holiday.

Costumes had a resurgence in the early 20th century in the United States as Halloween transition from being a religious celebration to being a more secular community celebration. The wide-scale trick-or-treating, which many of us experienced in the U.S., didn't really get established until after World War II, when many soldiers coming back from the war established families and the baby boomed, generation were children. Radio and TV shows in the late 40s and early 50s showed trick-or-treating, which popularized the activity around the country. This was also part of a change in costumes, from things pertaining to death to pretty much anything. You could be a robot or an astronaut or doctor, or whatever, it really didn't matter. The phrase trick or treat harkens back to the 18th century tradition of pulling pranks, such as tipping over an outhouse or throwing rotten eggs.

In Ireland, the phrase which was used to be, help the Halloween party, which certainly sounds much less threatening. Today, a trick might usually involve toilet papering someone's house. The tradition of dressing up in costumes and trick-or-treating has slowly spread outside of the United States with its depiction in movies like E.T. It has started to appear to a limited extent in some other countries, often getting a great deal of resistance to the new cultural import. Dressing up in costumes by adults has been more readily adopted, as it's really just another excuse to have fun and drink. Most modern-day adoptions of cultural celebrations is usually just another excuse to drink. Jackal lanterns and pumpkins. Not surprisingly, pumpkins come from the

harvest festival part of the holiday. Pumpkins are native to North America and were an American contribution. As pumpkins are harvested around the same time as Halloween, it was a natural fit. Carving pumpkins and putting lights in them probably came from Ireland. There's an atmospheric phenomenon known as Will of the Whisp, where you can sometimes see a glowing light above bogs. It's the swamp gas that's often confused as a UFO. Another term for Willow the Whisp was Jack O'Lanturn, which was a reference to Stingy Jack, who was a fictional character who roamed the land with a carved out turnip with a light in it. The use of carved pumpkins was popularized by the Washington Irving story,

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, where the headless horseman had a carved pumpkin in place of a head. The story is popular around Halloween due to its subject matter of ghosts and pumpkins, but the story itself really doesn't have anything to do with the holiday. Because of the harvest connotations, pumpkins and jackal lanterns were actually used during Thanksgiving in the late 19th century. By the way, the world's record for the most lit jackal lanterns in a single display was by the town of Keene, New Hampshire, which had 30,581 lit at one time. Candy. A quarter of all candy produced in the United States is sold around Halloween. As I mentioned above, historically, when people went door to door, they would ask for food.

Candy was not that common. As trick-or-treating became popular in the 40s and 50s, it also became more commercialized, and candy manufacturers took it upon themselves to promote what kids really wanted. Candy, not apples or popcorn balls. I know as a little kid growing up in the 70s, we took trick-or-treating very seriously. The Holy Grail was finding the house that gave out regular-sized candy bars, as opposed to the smaller, fun-sized candy bars that everyone else gave out. If I may quote the character Strongbad from the cartoon Homestar Runner,

what is fun about less candy? Every year there were always urban legends spread about how houses put needles or razor blades into the candy they gave away. However, there has never been an actual reported case of this, as it would be really easy to identify who did it. The only reported case of a child ever being poisoned by candy during Halloween occurred in 1974, and it was by their own parent. At the height of the hysteria, there were actually hospitals that were offering to X-ray bags of candy. Candy apples or caramel apples or toffee apples, as they're known in the UK, are a traditional treat that dates back to the early 20th century. It's believed to have been invented by American candy maker William W. Colb as a treat for Christmas. It was later adopted for the Harvest Festival.

Black Cats, Witches, and Bats Neither of these things really have anything to do with Harvest Festivals or traditional All Saints Day festivities. They're rather modern adaptations of older beliefs which got linked to Halloween. due to the holidays' association with death and the occult. While the idea of witches has always been around European culture, the association with Halloween probably came about from the Salem Witch trials and its unique American history. The image of a witch flying around on a broom actually dates back to the mid-15th century,

where a Frenchman by the name of Guillaume Eldin confessed to flying around on a broom, and it was a man, not a woman. There are illustrations of witches on brooms dating back from the same time period. The stereotypical image we have of witches wearing pointy black hats actually come from L. Frank Baum's book The Wizard of Oz in the year 1900. The illustrations of witches in the book were the basis of the wicked witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz movie, which became the modern idea of a witch. Black hats have always been bad luck, and they have always been associated with witches. According to the belief in medieval Europe, witches would turn themselves into black hats so they could go unnoticed, but I don't know why they would do that when they could just fly a broom. There are a few theories on why bats are associated with Halloween. The first is that when the Saoan bonfires were lit, it would often result in bats flying up and away from the fire. The other has to do with the old wives tale that if a bat is found in a house, it means someone is going to die, and that links up with the Halloween association with death. Candy corn.

Thankfully, this abomination of a food product is only seen around Halloween. It dates back to the 1880s when George Renninger of the Wonderly Candy Company created a product which, was called chicken feed. The white, yellow, and orange pieces are designed to look like kernels of corn. Today, the candy company, Brocks, makes 7 billion pieces of candy corn per year, which is approximately 7 billion too many. They own 85% of the candy corn market today. Originally, the candy wasn't associated with Halloween. It was a penny candy that was available year round. In the second half of the 20th century, other better candy became more widely available, and candy corn became relegated to Halloween because of its harvest connotations.

So our modern Halloween celebrations are really a grab bag of ancient tradition and modern commercialism, with a mashup of harvest festival, pagan celebration, and Christmas Holy Day for the Dead. The only thing we need to do now, to really take the holiday to the next level, is get rid of candy corn. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James McAlla. Please remember to support the show over at patreon.com, where you can get exclusive merchandise and to leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

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