Costumes, jack-o’-lanterns and bags of sweets feel modern, but Halloween’s roots go back more than a thousand years. Its story mixes an ancient Gaelic festival, the Christian calendar, Scottish and Irish folk customs and, much later, North American neighbourhoods. Here is the short version, with the places where historians still disagree.

Samhain: the end of the harvest

In Ireland and other Gaelic lands, Samhain (pronounced roughly “SOW-in”) marked the close of the harvest and the start of winter. Because the Celtic day began at sunset, celebrations started on the evening of October 31 and continued on November 1. Britannica describes Samhain as one of the most important festivals of the year, a time when the boundary with the world of spirits was believed to grow thin.

Bonfires, feasting and fortune-telling were all part of the season. Much of what we know comes from medieval Irish writings, so details of the oldest practices are uncertain.

All Hallows’ Eve: how Halloween got its name

In the Christian calendar, All Saints’ Day (also called All Hallows, from an old word for a holy person) honours all the saints. In the 8th century, Pope Gregory III widened an earlier feast for martyrs to include all saints, and over the following century November 1 became the date across the Western church.

The evening before was All Hallows’ Eve. Over time, “All Hallows’ Even” was shortened to “Hallowe’en”, and then to Halloween. Was November 1 chosen to replace Samhain? Some popular histories say so, but historians are divided, and there is little direct evidence either way.

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Turnip lanterns, guising and Stingy Jack

In Ireland and Scotland, people carved faces into turnips (and sometimes potatoes or beets) and lit them with candles. Folklore tied them to Stingy Jack, a trickster who, the story goes, was turned away from both heaven and the underworld and left to wander with only an ember in a hollowed-out turnip. The tale first appeared in print in the 1800s, and there are other explanations of the name “jack-o’-lantern” too.

In Scotland, children went guising: dressing up in disguise and visiting houses, where they performed a song, a poem or a joke to earn a treat. The word shares its root with “disguise”, and guising is still popular today. Robert Burns’s poem “Halloween”, written in the mid-1780s, describes Scottish Halloween customs of his day, many of them fortune-telling games with nuts and apples.

Pumpkins, North America and “trick or treat”

Immigrants from Ireland and Scotland brought their Halloween customs to North America in the 1800s. There, the native pumpkin, larger and easier to carve than a turnip, became the jack-o’-lantern we know.

The phrase “trick or treat” first appeared in print in Alberta, Canada, in 1927. Historians point to small newspapers in Blackie and Lethbridge, and they disagree about which came first. Trick-or-treating spread across the United States in the following decades, paused when sugar was rationed during the Second World War, and came back strongly after rationing ended in 1947. By the early 1950s it appeared in comic strips and cartoons, including a 1952 Donald Duck film.

Halloween today, and how to share its history with kids

Today Halloween is celebrated in many countries, with costumes, pumpkins and parties. It is different from Día de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead), celebrated in Mexico on November 1 and 2 to remember and honour family members who have died, though the two fall close together.

Sources

Halloween history is full of competing stories. Where historians disagree, we have said so rather than picking a side.

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