Halloween is Gone....or is it?

A friend of mine who owned a restaurant in Germany in the 1990s told me that she once asked her staff to wear costumes for Halloween, but as guests showed up, they asked in bewilderment why the staff were wearing funny costumes. Halloween is -- or at least was -- a very American holiday, but in many ways that's not really true. It has been spreading to Europe for some years now, so that only a few years after my friend's failed Halloween experiment, German children were donning ghastly costumes and declaring "Trick oder Treat" to candy-laden homeowners. It is by now a firmly-established tradition across much of Europe. Of course, it already existed in Europe before the importation of the American version.

In Central Europe, until very recently it was a more solemn religious holiday observed by families on what to Americans is Halloween night, but to Christians elsewhere is All Saints Day Eve. November 1 is All Saints Day on the Christian calendar, and so on the even before -- i.e., October 31 -- Christians in Central Europe go to their local cemetery at dusk and place colorful candles on the graves of their loved ones, and sit as a family and tell stories about those passed on, or just pray quietly. Because it's usually fairly cold at this time of year after dark this ritual doesn't last too long, but it is a beautiful sight to see the sea of candle lights dancing in the evening darkness. (Note the picture above from St. Michael the Archangel Church in Silesia, southwestern Poland.)

But of course, this Christian holiday has deep roots in Europe, roots far older than Christianity, roots more akin to the more pagan themes common in the American Halloween holiday. Pagan agricultural societies in pre-Christian Europe held huge parties in the autumn, end-of-harvest celebrations (like the Bavarian Oktoberfest) both to celebrate the end of a lot of hard work all summer long, but as well as a final send-off to the good weather, and recognizing in the process that a long, hard and potentially deadly winter lay ahead. For us today, winter is just a nuisance but in pre-modern societies, winters were a long period when all the food came from the previous summer's harvest, and if it went bad or if it ran out, then people simply died of starvation. Also, having lots of people huddled together in close quarters with minimal fresh air for months did wonders for diseases. This is why peoples threw a party in early spring -- like Mardi Gras -- as a sort of "Holy crap, we made it!" party, but it also shows you why people associated death with winter and fall. Add in the visual cues of the scenery seemingly dying in the fall and winter (only to be reborn next spring), and you have clear signs of death everywhere in the autumn, and so it was on everyone's mind. People began to believe that the autumn was a time when death entered the world, and the dead could interact with the living -- prompting lots of rituals and superstitions about how one should deal with them. Thus were born both Halloween and the Christian All Saints Day. Many of the particular trappings of the American Halloween such as jack-o-lanterns have been traced to pre-Christian Celtic practices, but the truth is that the essence of Halloween permeated nearly all of Europe.

Happy Halloween, folks.