Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween
In October I read fun spooky books, so this weeks book is Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween by Lisa Morton.
Halloween has a storied history that goes back a lot further than most people would realize. Historically, 10/31 was Samhain, a Celtic holiday which means Summers end. That’s it. It was a harvest festival for the Celts. And with the take over of Catholicism as the primary religion of Europe, many holidays eventually glommed together and became one, All Hallows Day, Feast of All Saints, Martinmas….all celebrated in early November, with Samhain eventually becoming Hallows Evening…or Halloween, the night before the Feast of All Saints.
And it is historically referred to as Hallowe’en at least as far back as Shakespeare who refers to Hallowmas in Two Gentlemen of Verona and in Richard II, as well as Shakespeares contemporary Sir Walter Scott, who wrote in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and Tamlane, which refer to Hallowe’en and Hallowday as far back as 1548.
Where things took a particularly spooky turn and created this juggernaut of haunted houses and fright fests was 1762. In that year, British military engineer Charles Vallancey did a survey of Ireland. And despite well documented books by reputable linguists and historians charting that Samhain was Summers End harvest festival, he put a decidedly….Penny Dreadful spin on it, insisting that Samhain was actually a Celtic deity who was known as Balsab…for Bal is lord and Sab is death.
It's important to note that Vallancey’s work is the ONLY place that ever references Balsab. Ever. But from this, church’s have spent the next 262 years decrying Halloween as a Satanic holiday that worships the dead. Not even 100 years later Vallencey’s work was denounced as having “more nonsense than any man of his time”…yet the decrying of Halloween as satanic still continues with fundamentalist religions into today.
After introducing how Halloween came to be, Morton traces it’s progression from a Celtic holiday, which included bobbing for apples and carving turnips…pumpkins were an American addition to the holiday. And Samhain wasn’t just a chance to visit with the ancestors, this was also the time when fairies, pookas, and witches roamed the land.
I feel like it should be clarified here that witches are not JUST a Christian belief. If you recall from last weeks book, Art of the Grimoire, there’s a LONG history of witches with civilization. Halloween made the leap to America with the enormous influx of Irish immigrants that came about as a result of the potato famine in the mid-19th century.
If you recall from the book I read in April, The Immortal Irishman, the potato famine was between 1845 and 1852. It would take another 100 years before Trick or Treat really became a thing anywhere.
Initially, Halloween was local get togethers. Magazines started printing stories of what Halloween was and what kind of games you might have during a Halloween party, including bobbing for apples. Decorations might include carved pumpkins. Eventually, Halloween became a night of mischief and mayhem for the youth of America as they would pull pranks. Pranks like….removing all the gates from the houses in a neighborhood. This was annoying and might result in loose livestock, but not dangerous or harmful. Until it was, and you get things like Devil’s Night, Goosey Night, Mischief Night, Cabbage Night, Damage Night. And as they do, parents became concerned. I mean, 120 years ago, parents actually cared if they were raising delinquents and good moral people.
Ok, enough of the soap box and high horse. As the mischief nights got more…rambunctious…society started looking for ways to reign it in, and first, costume parties, then eventually…Trick or Treat. Which first made it’s appearance around I believe she said World War 2. No joke. It is not as old as we all thought.
And it keeps on keeping on as the boomers who grew up with it and loved it and had good memories, wanted those memories for their kids, and so Gen X grew up with it, and passed it on.
Halloween festivities have spread, with mixed success, across the northern hemisphere. And is virtually unheard of south of the Equator.
Morton builds the history of this holiday, from Summers End festival to global juggernaut, and includes branches of the festival like year round haunted houses, commercialization in theme parks, Hollywood’s contributions to Halloween, and where things were as of 2012 when this book was published. And it has continued to grow in the decade since publication, as I just saw an Instagram reel yesterday showing a massive parade in Ireland…where Halloween started.
This book was not bad. A little repetitive with the second and sixth chapters. I do love how she mentions the books….yes, BOOKS, that contributed to the overall iconography of Halloween in the 19th century, those books being The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving, Black Cat by Edgar Allen Poe, and Young Goodman Browne by Nathanial Hawthorn, which gave us pumpkins, black cats, and witches as the overarching theme of horror for Halloween. And as she points out, what’s interesting about this, is that NONE of these books are explicitly set at Halloween. They are set, at most, the Autumn of the year, with no specific mention to Halloween, All Saints Day, or even October. And yet all three have come to be representative of this particular holiday.
It does cover a lot of religious crossover, which is fair, since at heart it was religion that created this event. I do love how she devoted an entire chapter to Dias de los Meurtos, which often gets conflated with Halloween, but is very much it’s own festival. The two may play well together, but they are separate events.
There was some good history here, and the book is well researched and well presented, but a little repetitive in parts.
