Special
Memories of Halloween
by Nancy Fee
For
our North American members, Halloween (or Holy Eve) October 31 is a
holiday with special memories. This is the holiday of ghosts and goblins,
and spirits. It’s a non-commercial holiday, and especially for children.
Kids go door to door in their neighborhood, collecting candy, and saying
“Trick or Treat”, meaning give us a treat, or we will play a trick on
you. Adults hold parties, and also play tricks on each other. As children,
we ended up with a large bag full of candy, which we would eat over the
The History of Halloween
Halloween is an old holiday, with origins going back thousands of years. It has developed from the Roman’s Pomona Day, to the Celtic festival of Samhain, to the Christian holidays of All Saints and All Souls Days.
Hundreds of years ago the Celts lived in what is now Great Britain and Northern France. The Celts celebrated their New Year on November 1, with a festival called Samhain, which marked the end of the "season of the sun" and the beginning of "the season of darkness and cold."
In the first century A.D., the Romans invaded Britain. One holiday they brought with them was Pomona Day, named for the goddess of fruits and gardens. Pomona Day was also celebrated around November 1, and after some years the Celtic and Roman holidays merged into one major fall holiday.
The next influence came with the spread of the new Christian religion throughout Europe and Britain. In the year 835 AD the Roman Catholic Church make November 1 a church holiday to honor all the saints. This day was called All Saint’s Day, or Hallowmas, or All Hallows. And November 2 was made All Soul’s Day.
On the eve of All Hallows, October 31, people continued to celebrate the festivals of Samhain and Pomona Day. Over the years the customs from all these holidays mixed. October 31 became known as All Hallow Even, eventually All Hallow’s Eve, Hallowe’en, and then - Halloween.
The Halloween we celebrate today
includes all of these influences, Pomona Day’s apples, nuts, and
harvest, the Festival of Samhain’s black cats, magic, evil spirits and
death, and the ghosts, skeletons and skulls from All Saint’s Day and All
Soul’s Day.
Halloween Memories
We asked a few UNWA members about their memories of Halloween.
Jean Sack recalled celebrating Halloween in Dhaka with her young children, said that "Dhaka of the late 1970s was a great place for costume-making, but not just taking fabric to the tailors. My 4 year old son and I took two boxes and painted them bright Lego colors and then attached four inverted red plastic cups on the top ends of the larger box. With arm holes at the sides and a face cut in front of the smaller upper box, Paul Sack looked like a walking Lego. Others child/parent teams in our coop preschool transformed boxes into dragons, castles, and robots."
Vanessa Brooks reflected on Halloween in both the USA and Dhaka: "My children first contracted "Halloween Fever" in the United States. My daughter was 3 and my son was 21 months when they first went door-to-door in Columbia, Maryland, dressed up in their costumes and asking for sweets. Columbia, Maryland is your classic suburban community 25 miles from Washington DC. There Halloween is a community event, where people transform their garages into haunted houses with spider webs and smoke machines and costumes range from the most outrageous ghoulish garb, to fairy princesses, Ethiopian queens, and the latest characters from the feature Disney film of the year. In Dhaka, the American Club has successfully re-created a haunted house on the squash court for several years. My son, Alexander, won first prize last year for his original costume—a very convincing triceratops dinosaur with an authentic mask from the Smithsonian museum in Washington."
Tara O’Day, a new member from the USA, said that, "Halloween reminds me of crisp autumn leaves underfoot and the anticipation of eating sweets until woozy."