It's Halloween time of year. The next few days we'll share some Halloween history trivia.
Halloween is from an old Celtic tradition, the celebration of Samhaim, the pagan harvest festival. Halloween came over to America with the Irish. They believed this was one of the times of the year, in between the harvest and the coming of winter, when it was easiest for the spirits of the dead as well as other non-human spirits like demons and fairies to cross over into the living human world. The barrier between the two worlds was thinnest.
Now they actually welcomed the spirits of their deceased loved ones into their homes; they even set places at the dinner table for them.
But the non-human spirits, the demons and the fairies, were another matter. The Celts did things to keep these entities from bothering them and these became our American Halloween traditions.
First, let's look at costumes. Going back for centuries, the Celts dressed up like frightful demons so the real spirits would be confused and leave them alone. They also dressed up like the spirits of the dead in order to appease them so they would look favorably upon them from the other world.
The attached picture shows costumes from the early 1900s. Costumes were homemade and pretty creepy. They were supposed to be. But with time, Halloween became more "domesticated" and lost much of its original meaning.
In the 1930s, companies began to produce commercially made costumes. In addition to the usual monsters and werewolves, they also started featuring characters from cartoons and movies. Today we have everything from princesses and superheroes to Frankenstein's creation.
Included is also a picture from the RHS collection of local children in costumes in 1968.