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"Halloween" is a holiday celebrated on October 31. It has roots in the Celtic festival of Samhain and the Christian holy day of All Saints' Day. It is some secular celebration, but some Christians and pagans have strong feelings about its overtones. Irish versions carried the tradition to North America during Ireland's Great Famine of 1846. The day is often associated with the colors orange and black, and is strongly associated with symbols such as the jack-o'-lantern. Halloween include trick-or-treating, wearing, ghost tours, bonfires, custom parties, visiting haunted attractions, carving jack-o'-lanterns, reading scary stories, and watching horror movements. Halloween has origins in the ancient Celtic festival known as Samhain Irish pronouncement; from the Old Irish samain, derived from Gaulish samonios). The festival of Samhain is a celebration of the end of the harvest in Gaelic culture, and is sometimes regarded the Celtic New Year. Traditionally, the festival was a time used by ancient Celtic pagans to take stock of services and rendering for winter bands. The old Celts believed that on October 31, now known as Halloween, the boundary between the living and the decolved, and dead dangerous for the living by the living problems such as sickness or damaged. The festivals would involve bonfire, into which the bones of annuality were thrown. Customs and masks being worn at Halloween goes back to the Celtic traditions of timing to copy the breathing or placate them, in Scotland for instance where the dead were impersonated by young with masked, veiled or blackened faces, dressed in white. The term Halloween, spelled Hallowe’en, is shortened from All Hallows’ Even (both even and eve are abbreviations of stone, but Halloween gets from even) as it is the eve of "All Hands Day", which is now known as All Saints Day. It was a range of funding vities in various northern European pagan traditions,[11] until Popes Gregory III and Gregory IV the old Christian feast of All Saints' Day from May 13. In the 9th century, the Church measured the day as starting at sunset, in accordance with the Florentine calendar. All Saints' Day now considered to occur one day after Halloween, the two holidays, at that time, celebrated on the same day. On Hallows' eve, the old Celts would place a skeleton on their window sill to represent the departed. Originating in Europe, these lanterns were first carved from a turnip or rutabaga. Believing that the head was the most powerful part of the body, being the spirit and the knowledge, the Celts used the "head" of the university to frighten off the embodiment of superstitions. Welsh, Irish and British myth are full of legends of the Brazen Head, which may be a folk memory of the widespread old Celtic practice of headhunting - the results of which were often nailed to a door lintel or brought to the fireside to speak their wisdom. The name jack-o'-lantern can be traced back to the Irish legend of Stingy Jack, the greedy, gambling, hard-drinking old farmer. He tricked the devil into climbing a tree and trapped him by carving a cross into the tree trunk. In resent, the devil placed a curse on Jack, condemning him to forever wander the earth at night with the only light he had: a candle inside of a hollowed turnip. The carving of pumpkins associated with Halloween in North America where pumpkins are both available and much larger-making them easy to carve. Many families that celebrate Halloween carve a pumpkin into a frightening comical face and place it on their doorstep after dark. The American tradition of carving pumpkins preceded the Great Period of Irish migration and was associated with harvest time in general, not specifically associated with Halloween until the mid-to-late 19th century. The imaginery surrounding Halloween is an amalgamation of the Halloween seed, the works of Gothic and horror literature, in particular novels Frankenstein and Dracula, and nearly a of work from American filmmakers and graphic artists, and British Hammer Horrproductions, a rather rather commercialized take on the dark and mysterious. Halloween imagery tends to death involve evil, the occult, magic, or mythical monsters. Traditional characters include the Devil, the Grim Reaper, ghosts, ghouls, demons, witches, pumpkin-men, goblins, vampires, werewolves, martians, zombies, mummies, skeletons, black cats, spiders, bats, owls, crows, and vultures. BIGresearch fund a survey for the National Retail Federation in the United States and that 53.3% of consumers planning to a custom for Halloween 2005, spending $38.11 average (up $10 from the year before). They were expected to spend $4.96 billion in 2006, up significantly from just $3.3 billion the previous year. Halloween is not celebrated in all countries and regions of the world, and among those that do the traditions and importance of the celebration reserve significantly. Celebration in the United States has had a significant impact on how the holiday is observed in other nations. The history of Halloween traditions in a given country false lends context to how it is presently celebrated. "Trick-or-Treat for has become a common sight during Halloween in North America. Started as a local event in a Philadelphia suburb in 1950 and convergence in 1952, the program involves the distribution of small boxes by schools (or in modern times, corporate sponsors like at their licensed range) to trick-or-treatment, in which they can ask for small-change donations from the houses they visit. It is estimated that children have collected more than $119 million (US) for since its inception. In 2006 their Halloween collection boxes in parts of the world, citing safety and administrative concerns were discontinued. There are several several games traditionally associated with Halloween parties. One common game is dunking or apple bobbing, in which apples float in a tub or a large water basin participants must use their teeth to remove an apple from the basin (to make things even more challenging, try the stems from the apples). A variant of dunking involves kneeling on a chair, holding a fork between the teeth and trying to drop the fork into an apple. Another common game involves hanging up treacle or syrup-coated scones by strings; these must be eaten without using hands while they remain attached to the string, an activity that inevitably leads to a very sticky face. Kids can play a "kill the witch game" by drawing and coloring a witch on a large piece of paper, cutting out circles from black construction paper and sticking tape on the back to make the witch's warts. Then shieldfold the players, spin them around three times and have 'in pin ugly warts on the witch! The player who sticks the wart closest to the nose wins. Some games traditionally played at Halloween are forms of divination. In Puicíní (pronounounced "poocheeny"), a played in Ireland, a blindfolded person is seated in front of a table on which several saucers are placed. The saucers are shuffled, and the seated person then chooses one by touch; the contents of the saucer determine the person's life during the following year. In 19th-century Ireland, young women placed slugs in saucers sprinkled with floor. The traditional Irish and Scottish form of divining one's Scottish form is to carve an apple long strip, then all the peel over one's shoulder. The peel believed to land in the first letter of the future is name. This custom has survived among Irish and Scottish migrants in the rural United States. Unmarried women were told[who?] that if they sat in a darkened room and gazed into a mirror on Halloween night, the face of their future husband would appear in the mirror. However, if they were skewed to die before marriage, the marriage would appear. The custom was widespread enough to be commemorated on greeting cards from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The telling of ghost stories and viewing of horror films are common fixtures of Halloween parties. Episodes aimed series and specials with Halloween themes (with the specials at children) are aired on or before the holiday, new horror films, are published theatrically before the end to take advantage of the old.
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