Halloween FAQ
A combination of pagan & Christian customs.
‘Halloween’ is often referred to as a pagan tradition but while it is not endorsed by churches in its own right, it derives from Christianity.
Etymology
- Hallow is the old English word for saint.
- It long predates Halloween, a Scottish variation from the 1700s. The ‘een’ suffix is a Scottish variant ‘eve’. The ‘een’ suffix is a contraction of ‘evening’. ‘Hallowed evening’ or ‘holy evening’ was later understood to mean eve or ‘night before’ as with Christmas Eve
Dates for ye olde diary
- All Hallows Day has become All Saints Day in the calendar of the Catholic Church.
- 1st November is All Saints/All Hallows Day. This commemorates Christian martyrs.
- All Souls Day follows on 2 November. On All Souls Day Christians pray for the ‘souls of the (faithful) departed’. For Catholics it is not a holy day of obligation but the Church provides special masses and encourages attendance.
Halloween Customs
Like Christmas, Halloween combines pagan & Christian customs.
- lighting bonfires symbolizes the plight of souls lost in purgatory (Catholic) while frightening away witches and ghouls (Pagan).
- souling — going door-to-door offering prayers for the dead in exchange for “soul cakes” and other treats.
- mumming (or “guising”) was a custom originally associated with Christmas. It consisted of parading in costume, chanting rhymes, and play-acting. Source
Is the Catholic Church against Halloween?
There is a lot of confusion about this. Because Halloween has roots in Catholic traditions, it was sometimes the target of Puritan ‘anti-Popery’. In 1647 the Puritan Parliament banned Christmas and Halloween — reflecting a widespread feeling that the latter festival was sinister. This strong disapproval travelled with many of the Puritan pilgrims to north America.
In fact, the Halloween tradition only returned to the US with mass immigration from Catholic countries in the Nineteenth century. This in turn lead to objections from protestants and later from those who objected to the commercialisation of the festival.
Trick or Treat
By the 1930s Halloween festivals were increasingly associated with unruly anti-social behaviour. By the 1980s these objections morphed into a generalised complaint that Halloween had associations with devil-worship. Ironically, Catholics sometimes supported these objections in the mistaken belief that this reflected the position of the Church. Source: Richert, Scott P.
Halloween often features in Victorian ghost stories. Read and/or listen to E. Nesbit’s ‘Man-Made-in-Marble’ retold here.
