Halloween history: From ancient Celts to scary clowns

Halloween wasn’t always about children’s sweeties – at one point it involved up to six days of boozing and feasting.

How you celebrate Halloween depends on you – and whether you can get a week off work – but the beer and buffet approach is how they used to do it in this part of the world.

A bucket of Haribo Starmix is all well and good, but let’s admit it, the Celts have always known how to throw a party.

The ancient Celtic festival of Samhain is said to be where Halloween originated, although its meaning and date have shifted around down the centuries.

From Samhain to Halloween

Samhain translates as “summer’s end” and it heralded the start of the dark half of the year.

Livestock would be brought in from the fields and someone would get a pan of soup on the go and break out the blankets.

So far, so cosy. The only snag was the boundary between this world and the next became blurred during this in-between time and so folks also had fairies and spirits to contend with.

They lit big bonfires and wore masks so they couldn’t be recognised by no ghost and the Druids got involved, obvs.

Then the Romans came along and merged two of their festivals with Samhain.

One of them was in honour of the goddess of fruit and trees, Pomona, who had as her symbol an apple.

This may have been the start of the connection between Halloween and apple bobbing which exists today.

Between the 7th and 9th Centuries, the Catholic Church introduced a number of festivals around the same time to honour saints and martyrs and so as with Samhain, light was contrasted with dark.

Each event had plenty in common

The night before All Saints Day became known as All Hallows Eve, and then it’s just a hop, skip and a linguistic jump to Halloween.

Despite all the chopping and changing, each festival has in common bonfires, parades, costumes and masks.

These days Halloween is bigger event than ever, with goods arriving in the shops as early as August and vanishing well before October 31.

The real trick is snapping up Halloween homewares asap because if you leave it to the last minute, the thing you had your eye on may have been spirited away.

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