BY ISABELL HERLE Student Writer
Halloween is my favorite holiday. It’s the one day of the year where you can dress up in some kind of costume and eat all the candy you want and no one judges you for it, but I had to wonder, where did the Halloween as we know today originally come from? I did some digging, and this is what I found.
Halloween’s roots run deep, and go back 2,000 years ago to the time of the Celtics who lived in what is now Ireland, the U.K. and northern France and a festival called Samhain (sowing). Their New Year was celebrated on November 1. The Celtics believed that on the last day of the year (October 31), the boundaries between the living and the dead were blurred and the dead came back to earth. The spirits were believed to cause trouble and damage crops, but it was also believed that they made it easier for the Druids – the Celtic version of a priest – to make predictions about the future. For the celebration, Druids built large sacred bonfires where people would make sacrifices to their deities and would dress up in animal skins and try to read each other’s fortunes.
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