Halloween is a weird blend of at least two old holidays

👋 Welcome back to the Medium Newsletter
Issue #194: parenting boys v. girls + auditing your boundaries
By Stephanie Georgopulos

Ever find yourself frantically throwing together a last-minute Hawk Tuah costume for a last-minute Halloween party and wonder: Why?

Allow me to share the 2000ish-year-old roots of this surprisingly complex holiday. Halloween’s origin story begins with the Celtic celebration of Samhain (translation: “summer’s end”). Samhain was an agricultural festival that started at sundown on October 31 and ended at sunrise the next day. It marked the transition from harvest season to the “dark half” of the year, which was traditionally associated with death (today, we call it “winter”).

The Celts believed that on this liminal night, the veil between worlds was at its thinnest — a moment “when the normal order of the universe is suspended,” according to historian Nicholas Rogers. Now, what actually unfolded during Samhain is up for debate: As writer Nyx Shadowhawk points out on Medium, much of ancient Celtic history was “recorded by medieval Christians. That means it’s very difficult to tell how many of the ideas associated with Samhain are authentically pre-Christian, and how many arose after Christianization.”

There’s no denying Halloween’s ties to Christianity: It was established by the Pope to accompany All Saints’ Day, a holiday honoring saints and martyrs (Halloween is short for “All Hallows’ Eve” — “hallow” being another word for “saint”). Originally celebrated in May, Pope Gregory III elected to move All Saints’ Day to November 1 in the mid-eighth century — and Halloween moved along with it, forever linking it with the pagan celebration.

The reasons for this move are contested but, either way, it served an important purpose: with Samhain and Halloween now sharing a date, descendents of the ancient Celts began practicing a combination of folk and religious traditions on and around October 31 — and through this fusion, they managed to preserve pagan beliefs and rituals that may have otherwise been lost. It also resulted in something new: “What’s […] likely,” Shadowhawk writes, “is that the superstition that the doors to the Otherworld are thrown open on Samhain got mixed in with the prayers for the dead on and around All Saints’ Day, becoming a single belief — that the spirits of the dead return on that day.”

Catholicism’s early influence on Halloween may come as a surprise to some, given the church’s position on the occult (spoiler: they don’t like it). Certainly, the Pope didn’t intend to popularize supernatural beliefs or their accompanying rituals. But ultimately, it’s the people practicing a tradition who determine whether it lives or dies — not the church or any other authority.

Suffice to say, the “why” behind Halloween is complicated — but perhaps that’s a good thing? After all, the end result is a modern holiday that’s simultaneously secular, spiritual, and supernatural. In that way, Halloween continues to dissolve the boundaries of the ordinary world — and what better way to celebrate the liminal?

What else we’re reading

• Writer and mother Victoria Corindi challenges an old parenting adage: Are boys actually easier to raise than girls? Not quite: “What looks like ‘easier’ parenting for boys is often just a failure to address their needs in a meaningful way.”
• Originally published in 2019, Jenny Harrington’s “Three Magical Phrases to Comfort a Dying Person” is about finding the right words in the face of unimaginable loss. “We all need to know how to sit and talk through a time for which there are no words. A time when not even an ‘I love you’ will suffice.” For Harrington, that time came when she learned her eight-year-old son would not recover from cancer — that he was dying. What could she possibly say to bring him comfort? “He was heading into the biggest and most unknown of all experiences,” Harrington writes, “He needed to hear he would not be alone.”

Your daily dose of practical wisdom

The boundaries that protected us in one season of our lives “can limit, blind, or even damage us in another,” so make a habit of reviewing yours.

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Edited and produced by Harris Sockel & Carly Rose Gillis

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