Wheel of Topics #8

Boys and girls of every age
Wouldn't you like to see something strange
Come with us and you will see
This our town of Halloween
This is Halloween, this is Halloween... and I don't know how it finish.

Well, as you can see tonigh I will write about the all hallow's eve(AKA
Halloween). Since there are so many thing to be said about it, I won't
tell everything. It would be too long, so I will tell you about some of
it and keep a few other thing for next year. With this, I will have
another good topic for Halloween next years.

Lets start with the name. How can "all hallow's eve" become Halloween.
Some of our members from the united kingdom may know the answer. The
origin come form the scottish version of the words(if my info are
right). In Scotland, they called it "all hallow's even". This single
additional letter is enough to change the evolution of a word. By
putting toghether Hallow and even, we get halloweven, wi(t)ch is not
good enough. We take away the v and we get Halloween. Ok, I know that
word don't change like that, it takes time to pass from one word to
another. It took almost 4 centuries in this case.

Now for the disguise. I got some problem to find why we use costumes on
the night of Halloween, and this seems to be the best origin. For the
ancient celtic and gaelic people, it was a custom to disguise as ghosts
and monsters during the night of Samhain, the "Summer's end", to protect
themself against the evils spirit that comes on the world for a single
night(or many, depending on the legend). With your disguise, the real
ghosts and monsters would think that you are one of them and leave you
alone.

The use of carved lantern also share the same origin, although the
pumpkin lantern is american in origin. Instead they used big turnip
that they would hollow(een) to place a candle inside. They where often
carved to look like a face. They where used to scare away(or keep at
bay) the evil spirits. Some of the stories I found say that it is
because they fear the guide to the other world, who also possess a
lantern that looked like a face(may not be totally true, if you found
something else tell me).

When the christian belief entered europe, they allowed gaelic and celtic
people to keep those custom as a way to incite them to become
believer(the christian church seems to be everywhere in european
history). Well, this is the version I have seen about why we still
follow this old holiday, maybe its something else, we shall see...

Grim the reaper (Muahahaha-ack, cough, cough, why does it always happen to me)