Where Did Halloween Come From? The Journey From Celtic Samhain to Trick-or-Treating

When the Veil Between Worlds Grows Thin - The Ancient Origins of Halloween and How It Became the Night We Know Today.

Every year on October 31st, millions of people around the world carve pumpkins, don costumes, and hand out sweets to costumed children chanting trick or treat at their doors. But how many of us stop to wonder where these strange traditions actually come from? Why do we dress as ghosts and witches? Why do we give out candy? And what does any of this have to do with the dead?

The answer takes us back over two thousand years, to the windswept hills of ancient Ireland, where Celtic priests lit massive bonfires under darkening autumn skies and people prepared for the most important night of their year. This was Samhain, and it was the night when the boundary between the living and the dead dissolved completely.

The Celtic Festival of Samhain When the Dead Walked Among the Living

Long before Christianity reached the British Isles, the ancient Celts who lived across Ireland, Scotland, and parts of northern France marked their calendar by the rhythms of nature. For them, the year was divided into two halves, the light half of summer and the dark half of winter. And the night that marked the transition between these two worlds was Samhain, pronounced sow-in, celebrated on what we now know as October 31st.

Samhain was far more than just a harvest festival. It was considered the Celtic New Year, a time when the old year died and the new one was born. And because it fell at this liminal moment, this threshold between light and dark, between life and death, the Celts believed that the veil separating the physical world from the spirit world grew dangerously thin.

On the night of Samhain, the spirits of the dead were believed to return to earth. These weren’t necessarily malevolent ghosts, many were the souls of departed loved ones seeking to visit their families one last time. Celtic families would set places at their dinner tables for these ancestral spirits, leaving out food and drink to welcome them home. They would open their doors and windows wide, inviting their deceased relatives to join them for the feast.

But not all the spirits abroad on Samhain night were friendly. Alongside the ghosts of ancestors came more sinister beings, malevolent fairies known as the Aos Si, mischievous demons, and other dark creatures from the Otherworld. These spirits could ruin crops, cause illness, steal children, or bring terrible misfortune to any household that failed to appease them. The fear was real and visceral. If you didn’t make the proper offerings, if you didn’t show the spirits proper respect, you and your family could face a winter of suffering or even death.

To protect themselves, the Celts developed elaborate rituals. They would extinguish all the hearth fires in their homes, plunging their villages into darkness. Then, under the guidance of Druid priests, they would gather at sacred hilltops like Tlachtga in Ireland’s Boyne Valley to light enormous community bonfires. These weren’t small campfires. These were towering blazes built from bones and harvest offerings, flames that could be seen for miles around, symbolically helping the weakening sun on its journey across the winter sky.

Around these sacred fires, the Celts would burn crops and sacrifice animals to appease their gods and the roaming spirits. And here’s where things get particularly interesting for our modern Halloween, they would dress up in costumes made from animal skins and heads, wearing frightening masks to disguise themselves from the malevolent spirits. If you looked like a demon yourself, the thinking went, the real demons might leave you alone.

When the fires finally burned down, families would carefully carry embers back to their homes in hollowed out turnips to relight their hearth fires, a symbolic gesture of protection and renewal. These carved turnips, glowing with firelight, were the very first jack o lanterns, though pumpkins wouldn’t enter the picture for another thousand years.

How Christianity Transformed a Pagan Festival

When Christianity began spreading across Europe in the early centuries after Christ, the Church faced a dilemma. The Celtic peoples clung fiercely to their ancient traditions, especially Samhain. Rather than try to stamp out these deeply rooted customs entirely, the Church did something clever. It absorbed them.

In 609 AD, Pope Boniface IV established May 13th as a day to honor Christian martyrs. But by the 9th century, likely influenced by Irish missionaries who understood the power of Samhain, the date was moved to November 1st. This new holy day was called All Saints Day, or All Hallows Day, a time to celebrate all the saints and martyrs of the Christian faith. The night before, October 31st, became known as All Hallows Eve. Say that phrase quickly a few times, All Hallows Eve, and you’ll hear it morph into the word we use today, Halloween.

The day after All Saints Day, November 2nd, became All Souls Day, dedicated to praying for the souls of all the faithful departed, especially those believed to be stuck in purgatory. The Church had essentially created a three day festival of the dead that overlaid perfectly with the timing of Samhain, allowing people to continue their autumn traditions of remembering and honoring the dead, but now within a Christian framework.

But people didn’t simply abandon their old ways. The customs of Samhain persisted, blending seamlessly with the new Christian holidays. Bonfires continued to be lit. Costumes continued to be worn. And a new tradition was born that would eventually evolve into our modern trick or treating.

From Soul Cakes to Trick or Treat The Strange Evolution of Begging for Sweets

During the Middle Ages, a practice called souling became popular across England, Ireland, and parts of Europe. On All Souls Day, poor people, often children, would go door to door singing songs and offering to pray for the dead relatives of wealthy households. In exchange, they would receive soul cakes, small round spiced pastries often marked with a cross.

The verses they sang were simple but haunting. Soul, soul, for a soul cake. Pray you good mistress, a soul cake. Mercy on all Christian souls for a soul cake. Shakespeare even referenced the practice in his 1593 comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona, showing just how widespread the custom had become.

Meanwhile, in Scotland and Ireland, children practiced something called guising, short for disguising. They would dress up in costumes or old clothes, their faces blackened with soot or hidden behind masks, and go door to door performing songs, poems, jokes, or small theatrical pieces in exchange for food, fruit, coins, or nuts. Unlike souling, which had a religious component, guising was entirely secular, it was pure entertainment for treats.

There was also an understanding, sometimes spoken, sometimes not, that if you didn’t provide a treat to the guisers, mischief might follow. This wasn’t a violent threat, but it opened the door to pranks. Guising became associated with Mischief Night, a tradition of harmless but annoying tricks, moving gates, soaping windows, overturning garden furniture, that sort of thing.

The tradition of leaving out offerings also harkened back to Samhain itself. Celts had always left food and drink outside their doors to appease roaming spirits. The Christian practice of souling and the secular practice of guising both echoed this ancient custom, you gave something to the visitors at your door, whether they were poor children, performers, or symbolically, the spirits of the dead themselves.

How Halloween Crossed the Atlantic and Became an American Tradition

For centuries, these Halloween customs remained largely European traditions. But in the 1840s, a devastating famine struck Ireland. Over a million people died, and another million emigrated, most of them to America. These Irish immigrants brought their Halloween traditions with them, Samhain memories, guising, souling, ghost stories, and all.

Scottish immigrants arrived as well, and together, the Irish and Scottish transformed Halloween in their new homeland. In America, the holiday evolved into something more communal and festive. By the early 1900s, Halloween parties became popular, featuring games like bobbing for apples, a tradition that actually traces back to ancient Rome’s festival of Pomona, goddess of fruit, which had blended with Samhain centuries earlier.

But American Halloween also had a dark side. By the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween night had become notorious for destructive pranks. Gangs of young boys would vandalize property, overturn cars, cut down telephone poles, and commit acts that went far beyond harmless mischief. October 31st, 1933, became known as Black Halloween, a night of terror and mayhem that shocked communities across North America.

Something had to be done. Community leaders, schools, and civic organizations realized that if they didn’t give young people a better outlet, Halloween would spiral out of control. So they began organizing Halloween parties, parades, costume contests, and structured activities. And they revived the old tradition of guising, rebranding it with a new, distinctly American phrase, trick or treat.

The term trick or treat was first recorded in print in 1927 in Canada, but it didn’t really catch on across North America until the 1930s and 1940s. The phrase was genius in its simplicity. It acknowledged the mischievous history of Halloween while offering a playful bargain, give me a treat, and I won’t play a trick on you.

The tradition nearly died during World War II when sugar rationing made candy scarce. But after the war ended, trick or treating exploded in popularity. By the 1950s, it had become the dominant Halloween tradition in America, and thanks to American media and pop culture, it spread around the world. Today, even countries with no historical connection to Samhain or Celtic traditions have adopted Halloween celebrations, complete with costumes, candy, and children chanting trick or treat.

The Symbols We Still Carry The Hidden Meanings Behind Halloween Traditions

So many of our Halloween traditions trace directly back to those ancient Samhain rituals, even if we’ve forgotten why we do them.

Take jack o lanterns. The Celts carved turnips and other root vegetables, lighting them with embers from the sacred bonfires to carry home. These glowing vegetables served two purposes, practical light sources and protective talismans to ward off evil spirits. When Irish immigrants came to America, they discovered pumpkins, which were much larger and easier to carve than turnips. The switch was instant, and the pumpkin jack o lantern was born.

Halloween’s signature colors, black and orange, also come from Samhain. Black represented death and the dark half of the year, while orange symbolized the autumn harvest and the sacred bonfires that lit up the October night.

Even wearing costumes has its roots in those ancient disguises. The Celts dressed as animals and demons to blend in with dangerous spirits. Medieval guisers wore masks to avoid being recognized during their mischief. Today’s children dressing as superheroes, princesses, and monsters are participating in a tradition that stretches back millennia, we wear costumes on Halloween because our ancestors believed it would protect them from the real monsters walking the earth on Samhain night.

Why Halloween Still Matters

There’s something primal about Halloween that resonates across cultures and centuries. It taps into our oldest fears and our deepest longings. Fear of death, yes, but also a desire to remember those we’ve lost, to feel close to them again, even if only symbolically for one night of the year.

Samhain taught the ancient Celts that endings and beginnings are intertwined, that death is not separate from life but woven into it. The harvest was gathered, and the earth would soon sleep under winter’s blanket. But that death was temporary. Spring would return. Life would be reborn.

Halloween, in all its modern commercialized glory, still carries echoes of that ancient wisdom. When we light candles inside jack o lanterns, we’re echoing those sacred Samhain bonfires. When children dress as ghosts and go door to door, they’re walking in the footsteps of soulers and guisers who did the same thing hundreds of years ago. When we leave bowls of candy on our porches, we’re making offerings just as the Celts left food and drink for wandering spirits.

We may not believe that the dead literally walk among us on October 31st, but Halloween gives us permission to think about them, to remember them, to honor them. It’s a night when we can playfully confront our fear of death, dress it up in silly costumes, and laugh at it. It’s a night when communities come together, when strangers open their doors to children, when the ordinary rules of the world are temporarily suspended.

The veil between past and present, like the veil between worlds that the Celts feared and revered, grows thin on Halloween. And in that thinning, we connect to something ancient, something that predates Christianity, that predates Rome, that reaches back to firelit hilltops and people dressed in animal skins, trying to make sense of the darkness.

So this Halloween, as you carve your pumpkin or hand out candy or admire the neighborhood decorations, take a moment to remember. You’re not just participating in a modern holiday. You’re part of a tradition that stretches back more than two thousand years. You’re walking in the footsteps of Druids and saints, of Irish immigrants and medieval guisers, of ancient Celts who stood on hilltops watching sacred fires burn against the October night.

The spirits may not literally walk among us anymore. But the memories do. And that, perhaps, is magic enough.