No tricks, just treats. A history of Halloween

As the leaves subtly change from green to autumn shades of orange, yellow and red, and the air becomes crisp, it’s time once again for one of America’s most popular holidays: Halloween. There’s no official ranking of holidays, but the estimate for consumer spending on Halloween in 2022 is $10.6 billion. That would surpass the previous record by $500 million. As I contributed to this total during a shopping trip with my wife for candy to distribute, my mind was flooded with memories from Halloween as a child and some, too, as an adult. I thought it would be a good time to reflect on the history of Halloween and the origins of many of the customs we associate with it.

Vintage decorations from my childhood.

The Original Halloween 

The origins of Halloween long predate the United States, going back 2,000 years. The ancient Celtic festival of Samhain celebrated the end of harvest season and the start of the dark half year. Celts divided their years between the light half and the dark half.  During the Samhain festival, observed between October 30 and November 1, it was believed that the barriers between the physical world and the spiritual world would break down on October 31 and allow for spirits to walk the earth. Bonfires were constructed and scary costumes were donned to protect the living and force the spirits back to the spirit world. Residents extinguished fires in their homes and paraded to the bonfire, making noise and causing havoc to lead the evil spirits away from their homes. Of note, the bat became an early symbol of Halloween as they were often and only observed during these bonfires in an era without artificial lights. As the Catholic Church gained influence throughout Europe, Pope Gregory III moved All Saints’ Day (Hallowmas) and the previous evening’s All Hallows’ Eve from May 13 to November 1 in an effort to diminish the influence of the pagan ritual of Samhain. All Saints’ Day was created to honor saints and martyrs but shared similarities with Samhain, including the bonfires and costume wearing. Over time, All Hallows’ Eve morphed into Halloween as an amalgamation of the traditions of both holidays, so rather than eliminating the pagan celebration, it was in part preserved by the Catholic Church’s action. For nearly 1,000 years the Halloween celebrations continued, mostly in rural areas, but in the 1600s the traditions appeared in cities after Guy Fawkes was executed for his plot to blow up the House of Lords in London. Guy Fawkes Day was observed with the mocking of Fawkes: children caused chaos, built bonfires and paraded on November 5 annually. Eventually, the combination of all three holidays would arrive in America to help create the Halloween tradition we know.

American Halloween

Harvest celebrations started in the colonies, but there are few accounts of Halloween-like celebrations in early America, mostly due to strict religious influences, especially in New England. English settlers in the colonies brought the tradition of wearing costumes and telling scary stories, but Halloween’s true arrival in the United States came with the wave of Irish immigrants in the mid-19th century as a result of the potato famine. They brought with them many of the traditions we associate with Halloween, including Jack-o’-lanterns, bobbing for apples and a form of trick-or-treat. Other traditions were brought by the Scottish, such as playing games, fireworks and making mischief. An 1862 article in the Philadelphia Press described Halloween as “a time when witches, devils and other mischief-making beings are all aboard on their baneful midnight rounds.” The newspaper further added that it was also when “street boys club together and ring multitudinous doorbells, hiding up alleys and behind corners, and exploding into shrieks of laughter at the ultimate success of their tintinnabulations.” The mischief-making was a central part of the holiday, and by the early 20th century, it actually had gotten out of hand, but more on that later.

The American Civil War caused a preoccupation with death. Many of the soldiers who were killed had unrecorded deaths, leaving families wondering what happened to loved ones and hoping they would come home. This led to the popularity of ghost stories with so many unclaimed and unknown dead bodies. The first ghost stories were about people returning home. Combining these ghost stories with the previous traditions, Halloween took off in popularity. Ghost stories also gave us the sinister boogeyman. A bogey was an amorphous ghost that pestered children. They typically hid under beds or tapped on windows in acts to frighten children. The bogey soon became the bogeyman and then boogeyman. The term is still used by children to describe an object of fear and was notably used to first describe Michael Myers in the movie Halloween when Myers is initially spotted by Tommy Doyle while Laurie Strode was babysitting. 

Civil War era Halloween cartoon featuring Jefferson Davis

By 1900, Halloween in America was a blend of various cultures' customs and had become a sort of melting pot holiday. It also became a more commercial holiday as it became less European and more distinctly American with an emphasis on celebrations that were more festive and entertaining but less religious. Postcards and other decorations became popular in the early 20th century. The first postcards featured Jack-o’-lanterns but soon included a variety of symbols, including cats, owls, bats and any other symbol that were perceived as scary. Halloween parades, celebrations, costume contests and trick-or-treating all soon followed. The scary stories gave us Halloween movies, music, television specials, haunted houses and a myriad of other Halloween-themed items. There also came the addition of light-hearted and fun Halloween-inspired miscellany—like Charlie Brown’s The Great Pumpkin, Count Chocula cereal and the song “Monster Mash”—in addition to the hair-raising and bone-chilling aspects that previously existed, collectively creating the holiday we know today as Halloween. 

Early 20th century Halloween postcard

I can’t resist adding a bit of Presidential history. The first President to observe Halloween in the White House was Dwight Eisenhower in 1958. It has been an annual celebration since.

Costumes

The tradition of wearing costumes is one the oldest customs of the Halloween holiday. It originated with the belief a mask or costume would ward off evil spirits. They were later an essential part of early trick-or-treating-like activities in the 1600s, often called “guising,” where participants would sing, act or tell a story for some reward, possibly apples or nuts, maybe even a coin. As children participated in these activities, often at night, they wore costumes to disguise themselves, thus the name “guising,” so as to blend in with the monsters that were feared to be present on Halloween. This tradition made it to America in the 19th century. Early costume wearing in America utilized the monsters that were made popular from ghost stories and the gothic horror stories of the 19th century that produced classic characters such as Dracula and Frankenstein. Although you could purchase masks and costumes starting in the 1930s when they were mass produced, homemade costumes were still prominent. My mom recalls in the 1950s the most popular costumes were ghosts and hobos since they were easy homemade costumes. In the 1970s and 1980s, costumes of superheroes, actors, and science fiction characters grew in popularity and supplanted monsters in demand, as well as increasing demand for manufactured costumes and masks. Today costumes are limited only by the creativity of the designer. We have retail stores that specialize in Halloween costumes and masks. Americans spend approximately $3.5 billion on dressing up for Halloween. I remember my first Halloween costume as a child: a clown. My mom handmade my clown costumes each year, which, in retrospect, was pretty cool during an era when most costumes came in a small box with a plastic mask that was secured with a mere rubber band and had a simple single plastic costume overlay. However, being a clown offered neither “street cred” nor fright factor at the time. I suppose I was just years ahead of the times with my scary costume since clowns today are seen as unnerving. As an adult, and very fitting for me, my wife Jen and I dress as a flapper and gangster if we partake in Halloween festivities.

My clown costumes in the early 1970s

Trick or Treat

There are a number of origin stories that involve people, often children, going door-to-door to collect a snack or treat in exchange for either something good or avoiding something bad. 

One of the first examples involved prayers for souls in purgatory who, if they received enough prayers, would fly into heaven. Children would go “souling,'' a practice where they would offer prayers for said individuals in exchange for soul cakes (spiced cakes with raisins). This practice originated in the medieval era and continued in Great Britain and other parts of western Europe. As souling endured in the late 1800s and early 1900s in America, so did the mischief and pranks. In fact, the pranks increased in both frequency and severity, leading to the moniker “mischief night.” In America, early pranksters overturned outhouses, removed the hinges from gates, disassembled carriages and reassembled them on rooftops, spread molasses and threw eggs and vegetables. As cities grew in the late 1800s, pranks included false fire alarms, breaking windows and setting fires. By the 1920s and 1930s, the pranks were becoming nefarious and out-of-hand with both the amount of property damage and number of people being injured from what could be labeled as assault. At this point, Americans no longer saw these activities as harmless, and a solution was proposed: Trick or Treat. Call it extortion or call it bribery, but be sure to call it successful. Communities began to offer candy and treats to youngsters in exchange for the promise of no pranks or tricks. Though pranks remained, they declined drastically as the door-to-door practice of trick-or-treat became the accepted activity on Halloween. Except for a brief hiatus during World War II because of a shortage of sugar, the practice experienced wide scale growth. Today, “trunk or treat” activities are growing in popularity as going door to door has been replaced by going car trunk to car trunk in a parking lot, thus allowing for better security, parental hobnobbing and the elimination of the greatest safety threat with trick or treating—walking along poorly lit roads in dark costumes. 

The Jack-o’-lantern 

There may be as many varieties of the urban legend explaining what gave us the Jack-o’-lantern as there are actually Jack-o’-lanterns on Halloween. The common thread is about a fellow named Jack, often called Stingy Jack. He was a troublemaker and a trickster. On one occasion while having a drink with the devil at a pub, Jack convinced the devil to turn himself into a coin so Jack didn't have to pay for his drink. The devil obliged—in exchange for Jack’s soul of course—but instead of paying, Jack placed the coin in his pocket with a cross, trapping the devil in his pocket. Jack eventually relented and released the devil in exchange for not claiming Jack’s soul for ten years. After ten years of Jack’s own devilment, the devil arrived to claim Jack’s soul. The devil, not very smart, allowed Jack to have a final request of an apple to eat before eternal damnation, an apple which the devil climbed a tree to pick for Jack. While the devil was climbing the tree, Jack trapped him (again) in the tree by placing a cross at the base. Jack negotiated with the devil for the release of his soul, and the devil relinquished the claim on his soul to exit the tree. The irony is clear that the devil is beaten by an apple when Jack wins his soul. Nevertheless, when Jack eventually dies, he is denied admission to heaven due to his lifelong debauchery. Jack then arrives in hell, but the devil—in what may have been the first use of the emphatic “Hell No!”—turned Jack away. The devil did give Jack a burning ember from hell to guide him as he wandered aimlessly for eternity. As the ember was too hot to carry, Jack carved out a turnip to carry the glowing fragment, and the legend was born that gave us the Jack-o’-lantern. Based on this legend, children in Europe carved turnips to make their own Jack-o’-lanterns, and when the tradition appeared in America in the 19th century, turnips were replaced by pumpkins, which were native, plentiful and more convenient for carving. The first appearance of the term “Jack-o’-lantern” in American popular culture was in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales. The popularity of the pumpkin as the primary symbol of Halloween has reigned supreme since Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, with the ubiquitous pumpkin now used for decorating, for carving, and of course, for collecting candy in the ever-popular plastic form.

I'd love to hear about your favorite, or least favorite, Halloween story, maybe your favorite costume or favorite family tradition in the comment section below. Happy Halloween, everyone!