8 Halloween Traditions and Where They Really Come From

Long before anyone said “Halloween,” the Celts marked the turn of the year with a festival called Samhain — pronounced, if you want to say it properly, something close to SAH-win. It fell at the end of the summer harvest, around the last day of October, when the warm half of the year gave way to the dark and cold. For a people who lived by the seasons, that was the real new year, and it carried a whiff of dread along with the relief of the crops being in.

The Celts believed that on this night the line between the living and the dead went thin, and that spirits could slip back into the world. So they lit great bonfires and put on costumes, hoping to keep the ghosts at a distance. Nearly everything that follows on this list grew, in one way or another, out of that one uneasy night.

The calendar date isn’t an accident, and it isn’t random. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III set November 1 as All Saints’ Day, a time to honor all the saints at once. An older name for a saint was a “hallow,” so the night before became All Hallows’ Eve. Say that out loud a few times, let the centuries wear it down, and you get “Halloween.”

That new Christian holy day landed right on top of the old Samhain, and the two never fully separated. November 2 brought All Souls’ Day, which kept alive the belief that the living and the dead could still, somehow, reach one another. So October 31 ended up carrying both things at once — a saints’ vigil and a much older night of spirits.

The idea of dressing up didn’t start with store-bought superhero suits. During Samhain, the Celts wore disguises for a practical, slightly nervous reason: if the dead were walking, you did not want to be recognized as one of the living. Wear a costume after dark, the thinking went, and a wandering ghost might take you for one of its own and leave you be.

It’s a strange thing to picture — grown people in animal skins hoping to pass for the departed — but the instinct behind it is the same one behind your grandchild’s mask tonight. You become someone else for an evening. The difference is only that the stakes used to feel a great deal higher.

Here’s where honest history admits it isn’t certain. Historians point to a few threads that likely braided together into the doorstep ritual you know. One is the old practice around All Souls’ Day of the poor going door to door for small pastries called soul cakes, promising prayers for the household’s dead in return — a custom known as “souling.”

Another is the Scottish tradition of “guising,” where children in disguise went about collecting food or coins. A third points to German-American customs carried over by immigrants. No single one of these is trick-or-treating, exactly, but you can see the whole shape of tonight in them: a costume, a knock, and something handed over at the door.

The glowing face on your step has an Irish legend behind it, and it starts with a rogue called Stingy Jack. As the story goes, Jack tricked the Devil more than once — talking him into becoming a coin, then trapping him beside a cross; later pinning him up a tree by carving a cross into the bark until the Devil swore to leave him alone. Clever, but it cost him. When Jack died, Heaven wouldn’t have such a scoundrel, and the Devil, still sore and bound by his word, wouldn’t take him either.

Sent off into the dark with nothing but a burning coal, Jack is said to have tucked it inside a hollowed-out turnip and wandered ever since — “Jack of the Lantern,” then just Jack O’Lantern. In Ireland and Scotland people carved frightening faces into turnips (England favored big beets) to scare him and his kind away. When the Irish came to America, they found the native pumpkin far easier to carve, and the pumpkin we know today quietly took the turnip’s place.

That tub of water and floating apples has a surprisingly old pedigree, and it isn’t Celtic at all. It traces back to the Roman festival honoring Pomona, the goddess of fruit and abundance, whose symbol was the apple. When Rome conquered the British Isles in A.D. 43, the Roman festivals mingled with the local Samhain that fell around the same season.

Over the long centuries that followed, Pomona’s apples stayed in the mix, and the fruit became tangled up with games of courtship and fortune-telling — who would marry, and when. If you ever knelt over a cold tub as a kid, soaked to the collar and chasing an apple with your teeth, you were playing out something with Roman roots nobody at the party could have named.

The black cat crossing your path got its spooky reputation the hard way, through centuries of suspicion. In medieval Europe the animal came to be seen as a creature of the Devil. A church document issued by Pope Gregory IX in 1233, the Vox in Rama, cast the black cat as an incarnation of Satan, and the fear only deepened from there.

Before long people believed a witch could turn herself into a black cat, or send one out as a “familiar” to do her bidding. Puritan colonists carried those beliefs across the Atlantic, which is part of why the black cat still turns up on every Halloween decoration you own — a leftover of a genuinely dark chapter, pressed now onto a paper cutout taped to a window.

You could pick Halloween’s two colors out of a lineup, and that pairing isn’t arbitrary either. It reaches back to the same seasonal turning point the Celts marked. Orange stands for the autumn harvest — the ripe fields, the bonfire light, the pumpkins piled on the porch. Black stands for the dark half of the year closing in, the long cold stretch on the far side of the feast.

So the decorations in every drugstore are quietly telling the oldest story on this list: a last bright gathering of the harvest, and then the dark. The Celts understood that balance in their bones. We mostly just reach for the matching napkins.