Seri­ously peo­ple. Hal­loween has to be one of the most idi­otic “hol­i­days” of all time. Every year I usu­ally spend time at a “fall fes­ti­val” which really is just a “Chris­t­ian” alter­na­tive to Hal­loween, which I will do this year as well. There isn’t a more pow­er­ful word in the Eng­lish lan­guage to describe this hol­i­day than idioc­racy. Call me some sort of grinch of Hal­loween, but if you’re over the age of 10 and you are going trick-or-treating I’d ques­tion first if you were lit­er­ally deprived of all other friv­o­lous, infan­tile, juve­nile activ­ity; or if you are just that inse­cure that you feel moti­vated enough where you feel you need to imi­tate some child­hood char­ac­ter or try to be scary to the 90 year old lady answer­ing the door pro­vid­ing you with a Milkyway?

I don’t go to a “fall fes­ti­val” because I feel the need to pro­mote the idio­syn­crasy of an alter­na­tive for Hal­loween, but more to sup­port the lit­tle kids that choose not to do some­thing as stu­pid as the tra­di­tion­als of Hal­loween. When I was younger, as you can imag­ine, I wasn’t exactly look­ing fore­word to walk­ing up to a com­plete stranger’s home and beg­ging for candy.

Not only is the mod­ern ver­sion of Hal­loween ridicu­lous, but the his­tory behind the the hol­i­day is iron­i­cally quite the con­trary. Hal­loween can be traced back to Samhain, the ancient Celtic har­vest fes­ti­val hon­or­ing the Lord of the Dead, then observed on Novem­ber 1^st. Peo­ple lit bon­fires to scare away evil spir­its and “sac­ri­ficed” fruits and veg­eta­bles, hop­ing to appease the spir­its of the deceased. Some­times peo­ple dis­guised them­selves in masks and cos­tumes so that the vis­it­ing spir­its would not rec­og­nize them. In the old Celtic cal­en­dar, that last evening of Octo­ber was “old-year’s night,” the night of all the witches.

When Chris­tian­ity bur­geoned, start­ing in the fourth cen­tury, pagan fes­ti­vals like Samhain were very much frowned upon. How­ever, the Celts would not give up their ancient rit­u­als and sym­bols, so the Chris­t­ian church gave them new names and mean­ings. Novem­ber 1^st became All Saints’ Day (All Hal­lows’ Day in Eng­land) in the 7^th cen­tury, a cel­e­bra­tion of all the Chris­t­ian saints. The evening before All Saints’ Day, Octo­ber 31, became a holy, or hal­lowed, eve and thus All Hal­lows’ Eve (later Hallow-e’en, Hallowe’en, Halloween).

Hal­loween came to be accepted in Amer­ica with the influx of Irish immi­grants in the 1840s. Their folk cus­toms and beliefs merged with exist­ing agri­cul­tural tra­di­tions. The early Amer­i­can Hal­loween, there­fore, was not only a time to fore­tell the future and dab­ble in the occult, but was con­nected with sea­sonal tasks of the fall har­vest. Over the years, the holiday’s agri­cul­tural and har­vest sig­nif­i­cance faded and it became pri­mar­ily a children’s hol­i­day — one where they dressed up as the spir­its (ghosts and gob­lins) that their ances­tors at one time feared.

The word cos­tume came to Eng­lish via French from Ital­ian for “fash­ion” or “cus­tom, habit,” from Latin consuetudo/consuetudinem mean­ing “cus­tom.” Mask also made a trip through French (masque) from Ital­ian maschera/mascara, per­haps from Latin masca, “evil spirit, witch.”

Yes, I did my homework.