History of Halloween (6)

Hope everybody had had a great Halloween.
The spookiness just won’t disappear just because Halloween is over now.
November is a foggy month, a month where you see superstition raising and crawling from every corner.
But that will be another story.

Halloween and the Church in Germany

To my knowledge both German churches – I am talking about the Catholic Church and the Protestants, because I don’t know of any other church, but would be interested in the opinion – have a strange attitude towards Halloween.

On one hand there is the tradition of celebrating “All Saint’s day”, which was settled to November 1st by Pope Gregory at the end of the first millennium, and Halloween is the evening before that day.
An d we also know that “All Saint’s day” is the follow up holiday for Samhain.

“All Saint’s day” is a holiday in 5 of 16 German federal states.
Those are the states with a more Catholic background like Bavaria.

No holiday in Berlin.

History of Halloween (5)

Costumes

Some of these Halloween costumes just scare me.
When my son was younger, about 5 years of age until 9 years of age, we used to live in a little settlement in Berlin. 78 houses – so it was kind of a little village in the huge city.

Soonish the neighbors decided that the children should play “Trick or treat” on Halloween – actually we didn’t have such a tradition at that time.

It worked well for the kids, they collected tons of candy which were supposed to last until Christmas, but with the help of mom and dad we always managed to “kill” them much earlier in time.

The kids just stood in front of the door, shouted “trick and treat” at us, but I bet they never had a plan if I wouldn’t have given them candy.

Most of the costumes have been very scary.
My son made me sew him different scary costumes. One was with a skeleton on it, we used an old T-shirt of his dad to do it. I also sewed a habit to dress him up as the Grim Reaper, we used to craft a scythe or tieing a rope in a special way.

The background behind all the costumes was: They were supposed to be scary.
Usually no little charming princesses or funny clowns on Halloween – those costumes you will see at Carnival.
But you can meet a bloody mummy.

History of Halloween (4)

Superstitious Times

Halloween is a spooky time of the year.
The air is filled with superstition.

The reason for all these superstition is the belief of the ancient Celts.
You remember: the veil between our world and the Otherworld is thin.
So spirits from the other side can pass through.
These spirits can be either harmless or harmful.

So we are taking a closer look on Halloween superstition.
I think that most superstitions are necessarily connected with Halloween, maybe they are just practiced at Halloween.

They say that a young, unmarried woman should look into a mirror. A mirror which is located in a darkened room. By doing so, the girl will hopefully catch a glimpse of the face of her future husband.

History of Halloween (3)

It started with a turnip

As we have seen: one origin of Halloween is Samhain, the feast of the Celts and also Gaelic People.
The Celts and the Gaels used to live on the British Islands, especially in Scotland and in Ireland.

Traditionally they carved turnips  and put them into their windows.
Ever carved a turnip?
A German friend recently told me, that her family did so when she was a child down in the 60s.
I just can’t imagine.

By the moment I have such a turnip in my fridge. No not for a Halloween lantern, just for a nice stew, but I am hesitating to cut it, because it is such a hard work.

History of Halloween (2)

Church and Samhain

The church, which means in this case the Catholic Church, since every thing happened in pre-protestantic times did a good marketing job after establishing themselves.
Usually they took the feast of the pagans and covered it with a kind of Christian cap.

So the people could stick to their well known festivals, but now they were celebrating it under a Christian sail.
Clever guys those early Popes!

They knew that people wouldn’t have given up their festivals. So a little holy water here and a new name there, and the party went on and on and on …