The History of Halloween
Updated: Nov 4, 2024
“Fine, but everyone here knows that Halloween was invented by the candy companies!”
Max Dennison
As we get closer to the 31st of October, we get closer to the traditions that take place on this day, but why do we practice them? How did they come to be? The most popular, dressing in costumes and trick-or- treating, can be raced all the way back to the 16th century.
Called “souling” in England, this tradition began due to the poverty a large amount of the population faced, causing them to knock on the doors of wealthy families asking for pastries and soul cakes in exchange for praying for the souls of the wealthier families' dead relatives. In Ireland and Scotland, this practice (there known as guiding)
was taken over by children who dressed in costumes and, rather than offering prayer, performed songs, poetry, or any other sort of trick in exchange for a “treat” such as change, nuts, and fruit, creating the term we now use,
“trick-or-treat”.
The English tradition was later transformed into what was known as “Guy Fawkes Day”, a day commemorating the 1605 Gunpowder Plot which involved British children begging for coins while wearing masks and carrying effigies. This day was brought to the U.S. by the English which morphed into the version of Halloween brought by Irish immigrants in the mid-19th century (mainly the 1840s) during the Potato Famine. The practice of trick-or-treating surged in popularity around the 1920s due to the fact that on this day it was acceptable for young people to stay out late and pull pranks. This quickly turned into chaos when ‘pranks’ became vandalism and physical violence, though it was soon interrupted by The Great Depression when sugar had to be rationed causing few treats to be handed out, and further interrupted by World War 2. The Baby Boom following World War 2 revived this tradition in a more playful way as it became a common activity for children, turning it into a harmless activity compared to before, and creating new opportunities for seasonal advertisements. This carried on to become what our modern-day celebrations of Halloween look like, changing what was originally a resource for the poor into the fun childhood tradition of trick-or-treating.
