We All Come Out Like It’s Haloween

Anybody who has ever watched The Dirty Dozen will remember when Telly Savalas’ mentally deranged Pvt. Maggot giggles uncontrollably as the men chant their mission plan, how he loses himself when they cry ‘We all come out like it’s Haloween’.  However, the origins of Haloween are extremely far away from the assassination missions which preceded the D-Day landings!

Haloween is the festival which we all know (and most of us love).  Every 31^st of October, children (and adults) across the world don vampire and witch or fairy and hero Haloween costumes and go trick-or-treating, begging neighbours for candy and spare pennies in return for songs and small pranks.  We associate the night with ghouls and ghosts and we watch horror films.

Yet few of us probably acknowledge the fact that Haloween is a festival borne of a hybrid of Christian and Irish Pagan rites.  The Celtic festival Samhain once coincided the Christian All Saints’ (All Hallows) day and Haloween got its name as a shortened form of ‘All Hallows Evening’.  The Celtic elements of Haloween promoted the end of the autumn and welcomed the onset of the bitter Irish winter.  Great feasts were held and autumnal fruits and vegetables such as apples, berries and pumpkins were used in games like dunking for apples or they were baked in pies and eaten.

The ghostly aspects of the Haloween festival have little to do with the Christian connection with honouring the faithful departed (now on November 1^st) and more to do with the Celtic belief that Haloween marked a dissolution of the boundaries between living and dead and Haloween costumes were essentially invented to ward off predatory ghosts and demons.

The traditional Irish association of the 31^st of October with the mingling of mortal and immortal was brought to America (were Haloween) is an incredibly popular holiday, by the Irish Diaspora community who fled Ireland during the Great Famine in the mid-late 1840s.  In Ireland today, Haloween is still a successful holiday with few refusing to take part on religious grounds and many more people keen to get into ridiculous Haloween costumes and party the night away.

As a result of these origins, Haloween has captured the imagination of children and adults alike for many centuries.  It has always been a time to get together with friends and family, binge on luxury foods and have a drink.  In more recent times, Haloween is often accompanied with huge public fireworks displays and Haloween costume competitions.