Halloween

By Kelly Du
Every single October 31st, there is a holiday called Halloween. Many people celebrate this by either trick or treating, or putting up scary decorations. The majority of us see this as a spooky holiday, but do many of us really realize where Halloween started or what it celebrates?
Let’s just start with what Halloween means. According to our local dictionary, Halloween is the night of October 31st, the eve of All Saint’s Day. Just to break it down even more, All Saint’s Day is a christian festival to honor the saints in heaven. At the night of this festival it is said to be when ghosts and spirits come abroad. So basically, it was believed that the night of a holy day would be full of spirits.
Now, let’s talk about where Halloween originated from and came from. Halloween came from the ancient Celtic Festival of Samhain. In Celtic Ireland (around 2,000 years ago), this was the festival to separate the lighter half of the year with the darker half. Or the lightest/brightest season, summer, with the darkest/coldest season, winter. During this time, the division between our world, and the believed “other world”, was the thinnest, which made it easier for spirits to cross through. Since there were spirits roaming around, people decided to wear scary costumes to hopefully scare the spirits off.
    Although this isn’t the entire story of Halloween(because that would take a long  time to explain and write about) it’s the main gist of the story. To learn more about this, you can use our friend, the internet, but to make it up to you, I will include some random Halloween facts.

• The first Jack o’ lanterns were made from turnips
• Samhainophobia is the fear of Halloween
• Black and orange is typically used to represent Halloween, orange is used to symbolize strength, while black is used to symbolize death
• studies have shown that Halloween actually makes kids act more evil.
• If you’d been around for the earliest Halloween celebrations, you might have worn animal skins and heads.
• Some animal shelters won’t allow the adoption of black cats around Halloween for fear they’ll be sacrificed.

Citations: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/halloween-weird-facts_n_5948456
         https://www.factretriever.com/halloween-facts