Halloween is a peculiar celebration, to begin with. Halloween, also called Allhalloween, All Hallow’s Eve and All Saint’s Eve, encompasses many wacky traditions, the most standard one being kids dressing up in costumes and wandering around their locality trick-or-treating, expecting a plethora of sugary delights to dive into early cases of diabetes.
The roots of this spooky festival lie with the Celts, who inhabited the lands now comprised of Ireland, the UK and France about 2000 years ago. Halloween is celebrated on the 31st of October because of the ancient Gaelic festival of Samhain. This was usually the time of seasonal change marking the commencement of the long winter. The long winter marked a loss of life which gave Halloween it’s eerie feel.
Halloween’s ghostly origins are accompanied by some rather bizarre traditions; some practiced to this day. The most conventional traditions out of the lot being dressing up in costumes, trick-or-treating and carving jack-o’-lanterns out of pumpkins. Trick-or-treating originated from the tradition of children dressing up as demons at the end of the year. The idea was that if you ran into a demon, it’d think you were one of its kind. Another source to trick-or-treating was called “souling” when poor people would dress up and visit the wealthy houses in the neighbourhood. They’d exchange prayers for “soul cakes” which over time have become the Snickers and Reese’s we all know too well.
Many rituals related to Halloween focus on the plans of the future instead of the ghosts of the past. In Scotland, fortune-tellers ask eligible females to assign a hazelnut to each of her suitors and toss them into a fire. The corresponding suitor to whichever hazelnut burns to ash instead of exploding or popping signifies the girl’s future husband. However, other renderings of this tradition suggested that the hazelnut that burns to ash represents a love that will not last. In a similar tradition, the participants peel apples in long strips and toss these strips behind their backs in hopes that the peels will fall in the shape of the participant’s future spouse’s initials.
The Germans, however, put their own spin on things. They hide their knives away during the Halloween season. They visit the graves of their relatives and keep the knives hidden so as to not mistakenly injure any spirits with their knife antics.
Although, Halloween is riddled with a multitude of weird and funky traditions, be it “stash your knives away” or “Tinder with apple peels,” we know we’re dressing up for that Halloween party that’s right around the corner.
So, what bizarre Halloween tradition are you looking forward to keeping up with this year?