Halloween



Halloween is celebrated on the thirty-first of October. The Halloween festival originates from the ancient Celtic festival named Samhain, which was celebrated on the first of November. It marked the end of summer and the beginning of winter.
There are various ways to celebrate Halloween: carving jack-o’-lanterns, wearing costumes, building bonfires, visiting haunted attractions, telling ghost stories, trick-or-treating and many other ways. Wearing costumes was how the Celts traditionally dressed on Samhain.
On Samhain the ancient Celts believed that the passage between the world of the dead and the world of the living opened to allow all of the spirits (even the harmful ones) from the dead world into that of the living. So, on that day, people usually wore masks and costumes so as not to be recognized by the ghosts of the dead. It is probably because of this tradition that people nowadays wear masks and costumes on Halloween day.
The Halloween tradition of trick-or-treating comes from All Souls’ Day in England where, during the parade, poor people would beg for food and richer families would give them cakes called “soul cakes” as long as the poor people promised to pray for the rich families’ dead.
The name “Halloween” was first attended to in the sixteenth century and is a Scottish version of the expression “All-Hallows-Evan”. Evan means evening so the expression referred to the night before All-Hallows-Day.
The usual themes of Halloween are evil, death, monsters, magic, mythical creatures. The most frequently seen characters for disguises and decorations are ghosts, zombies, skeletons, witches, demons, mythical creatures, spiders, vampires, bats, werewolves, black cats and characters from famous films like Dracula, Frankenstein, Nightmare Before Christmas and all sort of horror films.

Here is a poem I like about Halloween written by John Updike:
The month is amber,
Gold, and brown.
Blue ghosts of smoke
Float through the town,

Great V’s of Geese
Honk overhead,
And maples turn
A fiery red.

Frost bites the lawn.
The stars are slits
In a black cat’s eye
Before she spits

At last, small witches,
Goblins, hags,
And pirates armed
With paper bags,

Their costumes hinged
On safety pins
Go haunt a night
Of pumpkin grins.