What You Probably Don't Know About Halloween
For a lot of us, Halloween is just costumes, candy, and carving a pumpkin without giving it much more thought than that. But the real Halloween history is stranger, older, and more interesting than most of us ever learned, and there's a real reason not everyone celebrates it, that has nothing to do with just "not being a fan."
It Started as a Celtic New Year, Not a Spooky Costume Party
Halloween's roots trace back roughly 2,000 years to an ancient Irish festival called Samhain (pronounced sow-in), marking the end of harvest and the start of winter. The Celts believed this was a New Year of sorts, and that on this one night, the line between the living world and the world of the dead got thin enough for spirits to cross over. Bonfires were lit, animal costumes were worn, not for fun exactly, but to blend in and avoid being noticed by wandering spirits.
The Jack-O-Lantern Started as a Turnip
This one surprised me. The carved pumpkin didn't come first, the Irish originally carved turnips, and by most accounts they looked a lot creepier than our smiling pumpkin versions. When Irish immigrants brought the tradition to America, pumpkins were simply more available and easier to carve, and the switch stuck.
Trick-or-Treating Might Not Be About Tricks At All
There are a couple of competing theories on where trick-or-treating actually came from, and neither one involves candy corn. One theory ties it back to Samhain itself, leaving offerings out for wandering spirits so they'd leave a household alone. The other points to a medieval Christian practice called "souling," where poor children and adults would go door to door on All Hallows Eve, offering prayers for the dead in exchange for small cakes. Either way, the "give us something or else" energy has apparently been part of this holiday for a very long time.
How a Pagan Festival Became a Church Holiday
In the 8th century, the Catholic Church designated November 1 as All Saints' Day, a day to honor saints, and the night before naturally became known as All Hallows' Eve, eventually shortened to Halloween. Many of Samhain's existing traditions folded right into the new holiday instead of disappearing, which is part of why Halloween still carries that strange mix of ancient superstition and modern candy.
Not Everyone Celebrates, and It's Not Always Personal Preference
If you've ever wondered why some people skip Halloween entirely, it's often tied to genuine religious or cultural reasons, not just disinterest. Jehovah's Witnesses don't celebrate Halloween, along with Christmas and birthdays, as a matter of religious practice. Many Orthodox Jews and Muslims don't participate either, largely because of the holiday's pagan origins. Some Christian denominations, including Seventh-day Adventists, avoid it for similar reasons.
It's not just religious groups either. Entire countries have had complicated relationships with the holiday. Halloween has faced pushback or outright bans at various points in places like Russia and Rwanda, generally tied to it being viewed as a foreign import that doesn't fit local culture or values.
What Other Countries Do Instead
Halloween as we know it, costumes, trick-or-treating, jack-o-lanterns, is largely an American export, even though its roots are Irish. Plenty of places mark this same time of year in their own way instead. Costa Rica celebrates the National Day of Masquerades on October 31 rather than Halloween. In China, the Zhong Yuan Festival, also called the Hungry Ghost Festival, centers on the belief that ancestors and spirits visit the living, a theme that isn't so far removed from where Halloween itself started, even though it actually falls in late summer rather than autumn.
Some Neighborhoods Take This Very Seriously
If you think your street goes all out for Halloween, there are neighborhoods (and entire towns) that take it to a genuinely impressive level.
Keene, New Hampshire holds the actual Guinness World Record for the most lit jack-o-lanterns displayed in one place, over 30,000 pumpkins, carved, lit, and arranged throughout the town for its annual Pumpkin Festival. They've held that record more times than any other town has managed to take it from them, in a friendly, ongoing "pumpkin war" with a town in Illinois that's tried to steal the title more than once.
On a smaller scale, plenty of neighborhoods have developed their own fun traditions worth stealing. Candy chutes, PVC pipe or a decorated gutter rigged from a porch to the sidewalk so candy can slide right down to trick-or-treaters, started as a pandemic-era safety measure and stuck around because kids love them. Some particularly ambitious neighbors have even built candy zip-lines, sending treats sailing from the porch to the street on a pulley system. And trunk-or-treat, decorating car trunks in a parking lot for kids to go car to car instead of house to house, started small in the 1990s and has become one of the most common Halloween traditions in the country, especially in neighborhoods that are spread out or not very walkable.
Some streets have become destinations in their own right. Places like Sierra Madre's Alegria Avenue in California or Carroll Avenue in Los Angeles (nicknamed "the Haunted District" for its dramatic Victorian homes) draw trick-or-treaters from well outside their own neighborhood every year, simply because the whole street commits to the holiday together.
For as commercialized as Halloween has become, there's something almost fitting about the fact that its roots are so much older and stranger than a costume aisle at the store. Whether you're all in on it, decorations up in September and a costume planned months in advance, or you've never quite understood the appeal, there's a real, centuries-old reason behind why this holiday looks and feels the way it does.
So this year, when you're handing out candy or carving a pumpkin (or a turnip, if you're feeling authentic), you'll at least know exactly what you're actually taking part in.
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