Trick or Treat

Halloween, like many holidays on the Western calendar, began as a a pagan festival that piggy-backed on a Christian holy day. But the origins of the day are rich, as Lisa Morton notes in her interesting if dry book, Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween. But, Morton writes, "Halloween is surely unique among festivals and holidays. While other popular calendar celebrations, including Christmas and Easter, have mixed pagan and Christian traditions, only Halloween has essentially split itself down the middle, offering up a secular or pagan festival on the night of 31 October and sombre religious observance on the day of 1 November."

Halloween can be traced to the Celtic Irish festival of Samhain. Morton debunks the notion that this has anything to do with Satanism--Samhain means "end of summer," and was a festival that celebrated the harvest. Over time it developed that the Celts believed it was also a day that the dead could pass over into the world of the living, but there was never anything evil about it. She also debunks the notion that Halloween had anything to do with a Roman festival called Pomona. She notes that some histories of the day are completely wrong, including one that mistakenly believes that the Romans conquered Celtic Ireland.

When Christianity took hold, the church did something smart: "The Church had found that conversion was far more successful when attempts were made to offer clear alternatives to existing calendar celebrations, rather than simply stamping them out." Thus Samhain was tied to All Saints' Day and All Soul's Day, which are not frivolous days on the Christian calendar, but at least in the West, they have been subsumed by the antics on Halloween.

Halloween in the early British days was centered around fortune telling. Much of the ways the Scottish did it were listed in Robert Burns' poem "Hallowe'en" (the word Halloween is an abbreviation of "All Hallow's Eve, but the correct apostrophe has been dropped over time). Once the holiday began popularity in America, though, fortune telling was replaced by pranks. Many of the Irish traditions did come over, though, including the Jack O'Lantern: "The legend of Jack, the blacksmith who outwits the Devil, appears in hundreds of variants throughout both Europe and America, and typically ends when Jack dies and, being denied entrance to either Heaven or Hell, instead wanders the earth with his way lit only by an ember held in a carved-out turnip." Pumpkins, being larger and plentiful in the New World, became the replacement for turnips.

Between the world wars, Halloween became less of an adult holiday and more of one for children. The tradition of trick or treat, meant to lessen the widespread vandalism and pranking, began to take root in the 1920s, with Anoka, Minnesota the first American town to hold an annual Halloween parade.

Morton then covers how other countries celebrate the holiday, with those that are primarily Catholic emphasizing All Saints' Day. Mexico, of course, has Dias de los Muertas, the Day of the Dead, which has influenced Halloween with its skull imagery. Interestingly, in Israel and Australia the holiday has never really caught on.

Her last part of the book deals with Halloween in popular culture, from Robert Burns to Tim Burton. Some works, which never mention Halloween, have come to be associated with it, such as Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hallow," Bram Stoker's Dracula, or any of the works of Edgar Allan Poe (I was interested to learn that Stephen King has hardly ever used Halloween in his vast works). Books that have used the holiday are Ray Bradbury's The Halloween Tree.

In films, Morton hits the major ones, such as John Carpenter's Halloween and Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. She also writes the popularity of certain figures, who previously had nothing to do with Halloween, from the advent of monster movies shown on television, and their ghoulish hosts, like Elvira.

Morton also touches on the growing industry of haunted house attractions, which began modestly with Disney's Haunted Mansion to a major industry all over the country, and the objections to Halloween from religious figures. Morton then notes: "Some reverends, among others, have countered by suggesting that if Christians are to ban celebrations on the basis of their pagan origins, they might want to start with Christmas and Easter."

There's a lot of interesting stuff here--I made plenty of notes--but the prose is rather dry and without much inflection from the author. It almost reads like a very long term paper. Many of the sections are simply long lists, with Morton only slightly changing up the language in an attempt to keep it vivid. But for those like me, whose favorite holiday is Halloween, its a treasure trove of information.