The Celts believed that the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead were thinnest at this time and so the dead could return and walk where they had before. The name means “summer's end”, and the festival marked the close of the harvest season and the coming of winter. Halloween traditions in the West date back thousands of years to the festival of Samhain (pronounced `Soo-when', `So-ween' or `Saw-wen'), the Celtic New Year's festival. It was actually the Church itself, however, which preserved the Samhain tradition in the West by Christianizing it in the 9th century, setting the course for a pagan Northern European religious tradition's transformation into a worldwide secular holiday which has become the most popular – and commercially lucrative – of the year, second only to Christmas. This error comes from the 18th-century British engineer Charles Vallancey, who wrote on the Samhain festival with a poor understanding of the culture and language, and has been repeated uncritically since.

The modern-day observance of Halloween in countries such as the United States and Canada – where this tradition is most popular – share in this ancient tradition, even though some aspects of the holiday are relatively recent developments, and can be traced back to the Celtic festival of Samhain.Ĭhristian groups through the years have routinely attempted to demonize and denigrate the observance, in part by repeating the erroneous claim that Sam Hain was the Celtic god of the dead and Halloween his feast. Countries around the world today celebrate Halloween in one form or another, from Mexico's Day of the Dead to China's Tomb Sweeping Day. The observance evolved from ancient rituals marking the transition from summer to winter, thereby associating it with transformation, which is still a central theme of the holiday.Įvery recorded civilization has created some form of ritual observance focused on what happens to people when they die, where they go, and how the living should best honor those who have passed or respond to the dead who seem unwilling or unable to move on. Halloween is among the oldest traditions in the world as it touches on an essential element of the human condition: the relationship between the living and the dead.

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