Halloween is a holiday filled with terror, laughter, and surprises. It is a holiday on October 31, the evening before All Saints Day. In most of Europe and North America, observing Halloween is non-religious mainly. The tradition originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain when people would light bonfires to burn crops and animals while wearing animal heads and skin costumes to ward off ghosts. It was believed that the spirit of the dead returned to earth that day. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III designed November 1 to honor All Saints. The evening before was known as All Hallows Eve and later Halloween. This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year before the new year, and the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. When it was over, the Celtic re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.

Over time, Halloween evolved into activities like trick-or-treating, carving jack-o’lanterns, festive gatherings, donning costumes, and eating treats. One of the most significant traditions on Halloween is trick-or-treating. The first theory suggests that during Samhain, Celtic, people began to dress as unearthly beings in exchange for similar offerings of food and drink. People would leave food out to appease the spirits traveling the earth at night. Borrowing from European traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to house asking for food or money, a practice that became what is called today trick-or-treat. If you don’t want to go trick-or-treating, you can always hand out candy at your front door. A fun fact about these traditions is women believed that on Halloween, they could manifest the name or appearance of their future husband by doing tricks with yarn, apple parings, or mirrors.

There are many other activities that you can do during this spooky season. There are a lot of activities to do that do not involve ringing your neighbor’s doorbells or dressing up. Some old-fashioned Halloween fun is bobbing for apples, trying to eat cider doughnuts off a sting, creating mummies with toilet paper, and many more. You can spend the spookiest night of the year trying to paint or carve pumpkins. You can carve fun and creepy faces onto your pumpkins with friends or families during the Halloween season.

Here are four ways to celebrate Halloween with your friends and family. First, plan a Halloween party. You can ask your guests to wear themed costumes, for example, characters from the movie Frozen or Trolls. No matter how old you are, dressing up is one of the best parts of Halloween. You can have a contest and vote on their favorite costumes and offer prizes for different categories, such as “overall best,” “scariest,” and “funniest.” Second, screen a selection of scary movies. Turn your home into the theater of terror with a private showing of some fright films. Classic Halloween movies include Halloween, Beetlejuice, Hocus Pocus, and many more. Third, decorate your house and yard with fun
spooky decorations. You can hang fake spider webs, show a hunted video on the side of the house, fill your home with balloon ghosts, and turn any door into a cute yet menacing mummy. Fourth, you can test your courage with a trip to a haunted house.! Get a group of adventurous friends and see if you can survive a tour of your scariest local haunted house attraction. There are so many fun traditions to keep you busy during this exciting and thrilling time of the year.