Spooky Fun of Years Gone By

The calendar seems to chug along, and believe it or not, it is the middle of October.  As a child, this was prime planning time for costumes and other Halloween fun.  While I know costumes and festivities are safer now than they were when I was a child, I somehow feel the children of today miss out on going into the store and looking at the rows and rows of boxes that were stacked on the shelves from about the end of September.  The cheap vinyl jumpsuits or dresses with the plastic masks were gold to us.  Even though we couldn’t breathe in the masks, and the elastic that held it on invariably broke before the night’s festivities had come to an end, we loved to stare with a critical eye over all of the boxes to pick out the perfect alter ego for the evening.

Halloween is said to have originated about 2000 years ago as the Celtic festival of Samhain, for the harvest or summer’s end.  During this festival, people would dress in costumes and light bonfires to ward off roaming ghosts.

During the 700s, Pope Gregory III designated November 1st as a holiday to honor all saints and martyrs.  By 1000A.D, Christianity had spread to the Celtic lands, and many of the older Celtic rites were blended with the Christian holiday.  November 2nd was designated All Souls Day to honor all of the dead.  It is thought that this was the church’s attempt to replace the Celtic holiday with a similar, but church sanctioned holiday.  The evening before All Saint’s Day holiday became All Hallows Eve, and eventually Halloween.

Some think the Irish brought over some of the practices of the old Celtic celebrations during the Great Potato Famine of 1845-49.    President Grover Cleveland is said to have grown up playing Halloween pranks and trick or treating. There is little documentation of revelers wearing costumes before 1900. The first recorded instance of an American Halloween celebration was in 1921 in Anoka, Minnesota. At that time, it was celebrated as a citywide civic festival.  Mass produced costumes became popular in the 1950s, when trick or treating became a fixture of the holiday.

Many other American Presidents celebrated the haunted holiday.  The Eisenhowers decorated the columns of the White House foyer with corn stalks and pumpkins.  During the Nixon administration, first daughter Tricia Nixon hosted a Halloween party for underprivileged children.  The Fords and the Carters continued to enjoy the holiday celebrating events to accommodate trick- or- treaters from charitable organizations such as  UNICEF.

The costumes have become a bit more sophisticated, and there seems to be (for the better) a closer eye kept on tykes than when we were kids freely running around the neighborhood, but I wouldn't give up my memories of trudging down my block with my plastic pumpkin for the world--  Happy Halloween!