October 31, 2011
Happy Halloween!
Halloween is finally here! While you’re getting dressed up to go trick or treating or getting the candy bowls set up why not take a second to learn why we celebrate the way we do. Halloween is a holiday that is mysterious to most. No one really knows why we dress up and go trick or treating, or why we carve pumpkins into jack-o-lanterns we just know that we look forward to it every year. Halloween is a very old holiday that has more than a few origins. The holiday that we celebrate today is a mixed pot of all these different backgrounds. Dressing in costumes is an old Celtic tradition. They believed that on Halloween the dead could return to Earth. To ward off these roaming ghosts the Celts would dress in costume and light huge bonfires. Carving Jack-O-Lanterns stems from an old Irish myth. The myth was 
about “Stingy Jack” who tricked the devil a couple times. Heaven would not have a man such as Jack and the devil had made a deal with him to never claim his soul. Jack was from then on doomed to walk to the Earth with only a piece of coal to light his way. He put the coal in a carved out turnip. People in Ireland and Scotland began carving pumpkins into scary faces to ward off Stingy Jack and other evil spirits. Halloween really started to blend together as people immigrated to America. Different beliefs and traditions slowly started to mesh together and Halloween started to become what we know today, a mixed bunch of traditions.
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