Getting into the spirit of things.

If you ask a lot of people what their favorite holiday is you are most likely to hear something like Christmas or Birthdays. Me, my favorite is Halloween. Why do you ask? It is not about the candy, though sometimes that can be a plus. It is a night to come out as you are not or as you wish you could be. You let all of your guards down and just have a good time. There is a certain feel to the air around halloween. It starts off with you needing an extra blanket on your bed, the air is colder when you get out of the shower, the leaves are crisp and changing colors. There is a silence to the air outside. Everything seems to smell and feel clean and crisp. It is the onset to winter coming.

Halloween is an annual celebration, but just what is it actually a celebration of? And how did this peculiar custom originate? Is it, as some claim, a kind of demon worship? Or is it just a harmless vestige of some ancient pagan ritual? The word itself, "Halloween," actually has its origins in the Catholic Church. It comes from the corruption of All Hallow Eve. November 1, "All Hallows Day" (or "Saints Day"), is a Catholic day of bservance in honor of saints. But, in the 5th century BC, in Celtic Ireland, summer officially ended on October 31. Halloween's origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain ("end of summer"), the Celtic New Year. They believed that the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred at this time. On the night of October 31, it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. They thought that the presence of the spirits made it easier to make predictions about the future. To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where they gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the dieties. The extinguishing of the fires symbolized the "dark half" of the year. The rekindling from the fire was symbolic of the returning life that was hoped for in the spring. During the celebration they wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other's fortunes.

One story says that the spirits of all those who had died would come back in search of living bodies to possess for the next year. It was believed to be their only hope for the afterlife. Naturally, the still-living did not want to be possessed, so the villager would extinguish the fires in their homes to make them cold and undesirable. They would then dress up ghoulish costumes and noisily paraded around the neighborhood, being as destructive as possible in order to frighten away spirits looking for bodies to possess. Some accounts tell of how the Celts would burn someone at the stake who was thought to have already been possessed, as sort of a lesson to the spirits. Other accounts of Celtic history debunk these stories as myth.

Folk tradition tells us of some divination practices associated with Samhain. Among the most common were divinations dealing with marriage, weather, and the coming fortunes for the year. Ducking for apples was a marriage divination. The first person to bite an apple would be the first to marry in the coming year. Apple peeling was a divination to see how long your life would be. The longer the unbroken apple peel, the longer your life was destined to be.

Trick for Treat has several origins. During Samhain, the Druids believed that the dead would play tricks on mankind and cause panic and destruction. They had to be appeased, so country folk would give the Druids food as they visited their homes.

The witch is a central symbol for Halloween. When setting out for a Sabbath, witches rubbed a sacred ointment onto their skin. This gave them a feeling of flying. Some witches rode on horseback, but poor witches went on foot and carried a broom or a pole to aid in vaulting over streams. In England when new witches were initiated they were often blindfloded, smeared with flying ointment and placed on a broomstick. The ointment would confuse the mind, speed up the pulse and numb the feet. When they were told "You are flying over land and sea," the witch took their word for it.

It is important to distinguish between paganism and Satanism. Pagans are people who believe in more than one god. Some modern day pagans call themselves Wiccans. Pagans are quick to emphasize that they do not worship Satan or the devil. The devil is a Judeo-Christian concept, they say, because one has to belive in a single God to believe in God's opposite. Celts were pagans, not Satanists. The Celts did not actually have demons or devils in their belief system. Some Christians describe Halloween as a festival in which the Celts sacrificed human beings to the devil or some evil demonic god of death. This is not accurate. The Celts did believe in gods, giants, monsters, witches, spirits, and elves, but these were not considered evil, so much as dangerous. The fairies, for example, were often considered hostile and menacing to humans because they were seen as being resentful of men taking over their lands. On this night of Samhain, the fairies would sometimes trick humans into becoming lost in the fairy mounds, where they would be trapped forever.

Irish children used to carve out potatoes or turnips and light them for their Halloween gatherings. They commemorated Jack, an Irish villain so wicked that neither God or the Devil wanted him. Rejected by both, he wandered the world looking for a place to rest, his only warmth a candle in a rotten turnip.

So although some cults may have adopted Halloween as their favorite "holiday", the day itself did not grow out of evil practices. It grew out of the rituals of Celts celebrating a new year, and out of Medieval prayer rituals of Europeans. And today, even many churches have Halloween parties or pumpkin carving events for the kids. After all, the day itself is only as evil as one cares to make it.