Halloween: Origins
Article by Bindi Lavelle

So, that time of year has passed where horror fans get to revel in their insanity, but how did Halloween as we know it come about?
The holiday’s origins trace back to the Celtic feast of Samhain, a harvest feast celebrated with bonfires, marking the start of a new year.
But where do the ghosts and creepy critters come in?
Well , Celts believed that the beginning of a new year blurred the boundaries between the living and the dead so masks where donned to confuse the bad ghosts. The dead were also permited to share the feast. This evolved into costumes like we have today and the feasting progressively became trick or treating.
Halloween went from a new year’s party with dead people to a darker affair with the rise of Christianity. This is where a lot of our modern Halloween ideas come from, ie the spooky stuff. Early Christains saw a feast involving the dead, as in direct opposition to their extreme anti-pagan beliefs; so in a effort to bridge the gap, 31 October , became All Hallow’s Eve (shortened now to Halloween) and 1 November was celebrated as All Saints Day, just to ensure that everything was clean cut and but no means pagen.
Since then Halloween has filtered though in one way or another in varying degrees to other cultures and has evolved from doing do. Halloween is a fluid celebration.