Friday, October 31, 2008

Some Notes About Halloween




Halloween is a tradition,celebrated on the night of October 31, also known as Hallowe'en, All-hallow-even, All Hallows' Eve, Hallow Eve, and All Saints' Eve.

Halloween, or Hallowe’en, is a holiday celebrated on the night of October 31. Halloween activities include trick-or-treating, ghost tours, bonfires, costume parties, visiting "haunted houses"
halloweencarving ,Jack-o'-lanterns,reading scary stories and watching horror movies.

Irish immigrants carried versions of the tradition to North America in the nineteenth century. Other western countries embraced the holiday in the late twentieth century.

Halloween is celebrated in several countries of the Western world, most commonly in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Japan, New Zealand, and occasionally in parts of Australia. In Sweden the All Saints' official holiday takes place on the first Saturday of November.


Halloween is very popular in Ireland, where it originated, and is known in Irish as Oíche Shamhna (pron: ee-hah how-nah), literally "Samhain Night". Pre-Christian Celts had an autumn festival, Samhain (pronounced /ˈsˠaunʲ/from the Old Irish samain), "End of Summer", a pastoral and agricultural "fire festival" or feast, when the dead revisited the mortal world, and large communal bonfires would hence be lit to ward off evil spirits.

Here are a couple of links to explain the origins of Halloween night and the meanings of it .

Please check the sites:
http://people.howstuffworks.com/halloween.htm/printable
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween

1 comment:

Pilar Villegas Cuevas said...

Luz, thanks again for your posting. Happy Halloween to all.