Halloween 🎃

If I tell you Halloween, what do you think? Candy 🍬, pumpkin 🎃, ghosts 👻, “Trick or Treat”, costumes?

Exactly, and you are right because this is how Halloween is celebrated today in many countries of the world (United States, France, Great Britain, Australia, Canada…).

Children (even older children) dress up to be as scary as possible and ring doorbells shouting “Trick or treat!”. The houses and gardens are decorated with carved pumpkins with a candle inside, spider webs and other scary objects.

The origins of Halloween date back over 2500 years to the Celtic festival of Samhain. Halloween comes from the contraction of All Hallows Eve.

This festival was celebrated in Ireland and Scotland and marked the end of the year and the beginning of the new year. On this night, the Celts believed that the spirits came to visit the living on Earth because the gates marking the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead were opened.

Nowadays our costumes symbolize the souls of the dead. The quest for candy has replaced the quest for soul cakes.

In the middle of the 19th century, the Scots and Irish left for the new continent and took their traditions and legends with them, and Halloween became the festival we know today.

Among these legends, we find that of Jack-O’-Lantern: Jack would be a lazy drunkard whose neither heaven nor hell would welcome him at his death. He was forced to wander in the dark with only a candle in a hollowed out turnip for light. Every year on Halloween, the day of his death, he reappears.

Over time, the turnip has been replaced by a pumpkin because it is easier to carve.