Halloween
... time were stopped during this time, allowing the spirits to go into the living world. Naturally, the living did not want to be possessed. So on the night of October 31, villagers would put out the fires in their homes, to make them cold and undesirable. They would then dress up in ghoulish costumes and noisily paraded around the neighborhood. They would be as destructive as possible in order to frighten away spirits looking for bodies to possess. Some accounts tell of how the Celts would burn someone at the stake who was thought to have already been possessed, as a sort of lesson to the spirits. Other accounts of Celtic history come across to people as myths. The Romans adopted the Celtic practices as their own. But in the first century AD, they abandoned any practice of sacrificing of humans in favor of burning effigies. The idea of the practices also changed over time to become more ritualized. As belief in spirit possession waned, the practice of dressing up like hobgoblins, ghosts, and witches took on a more ceremonial role. The custom of Halloween was brought to America in the 1840's by Irish immigrants when they fled Ireland because of their country's potato famine. At that time, the favorite pranks in New England included tipping over outhouses and unhinging fence gates. The custom of trick-or-treating is thought to have originated not with the Irish Celts, but with a ninth-century European custom called souling. On November 2, All Souls Day, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for "soul cakes," made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. At the time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for a time after death, and that prayer, even by strangers, could help a person’s soul a passage to heaven. The Jack-o-lan...