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Discussion on: How do you explain Halloween to a five-year-old?

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Matt Ellen-Tsivintzeli • Edited

Hallowe'en is short for "all hallows evening".

Like Christmas eve is the evening before Chirstmas day, halloween is the evening before all hallows day. Hallow is another way of saying saint, so all hallows day is also known as all saints day*.

There are two, seemingly unchristian traditions involved with halloween.

Pumpkin carving started in Ireland, and started as turnip carving. This tradition is nothing to do with Christianity and all to do with Samhain, a Gaelic tradition, celebrating the end of harvest time. The carved vegetables were turned into lanterns and used to represent or ward off spirits.

Trick or treating is essentially a type of shakedown with diguises, a shakedown being where a criminal threatens to harm you or your property if you don't give them what they want, but greatly watered down for children. There are many similar traditions through out history, although not necessarily performed during all hallows tide. Trick or treating itself seems to have first started in Canada about a hundred years ago, and is derived one of the traditions of the British Isles and Ireland, either soulsing, mumming, or guising, soulsing being of Christian origin, the other two coming from the need of people to eat.

The reason trick or treating caught on and guising at other times of year petered off, I don't know. Possibly because dressing up to scare spirits away is part of Samhain.

Trick or treating is not really done outside the US, Canada, and the UK and Ireland, but guising at other times of year is.

*This is a day in the Christian calendar for the Christian saints, not a day that celebrates the British pop act All Saints. Don't worry, you're too young to know about them.