Halloween: From Celtic Samhain to Trick or Treat

Halloween was not born in a shopping mall. Its roots reach back more than two thousand years to the Celtic festival of Samhain in Ireland, where it was believed that the veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead grew porous every October 31. Celts lit bonfires and wore disguises to ward off spirits, laying the groundwork for a holiday celebrated worldwide today.

Beneath modern candy wrappers and store-bought costumes pulses a millennia-old rite centered on humanity's oldest boundary: the invisible line between life and death, and our essential need to confront our fears as the nights begin to consume the daylight.

From Samhain to All Saints' Day

For the Celtic tribes of antiquity, time was not a linear calendar progression, but a cyclic wheel tied directly to agrarian seasons. October 31 marked Samhain (literally "summer's end" in Old Irish). It stood precisely midway between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice: the final harvests were gathered, cattle were brought down from high pastures to winter shelters, and nature began its quiet dormancy.

In the Celtic mindset, liminal thresholds—transitions between seasons, the twilight bridging day and night—carried dangerous supernatural weight. On that night, physical and temporal laws were temporarily lifted. The barrier separating the mortal realm from the Otherworld (the dwelling of the aos sí, deities, and ancestral spirits) became permeable. The dead were permitted to visit their former hearths, but capricious and wandering entities slipped through alongside them.

To avoid falling prey to these unseen wanderers, communities relied on two survival tactics: fire and camouflage. Ceremonial bonfires atop sacred ridges such as Tlachtga or the Hill of Tara served to guide benevolent ancestors and cleanse the darkness. Simultaneously, villagers blackened their faces with ash or draped themselves in animal hides and masks. This early practice of disguise (guising) was not for entertainment, but self-preservation: blending in with hostile spirits to pass unnoticed through the shadows.

From Praying for Souls to Modern Trick-or-Treating

The belief that the Catholic Church outright abolished pagan observances is a persistent historical oversimplification; more often, the strategy involved renaming and absorbing them. In the 8th century, Pope Gregory III shifted the Feast of All Saints from May 13 to November 1, and two centuries later Cluny Abbey instituted November 2 as All Souls' Day. Across the British Isles, the preceding eve became known as All Hallows' Eve, a phrase eventually contracted into Halloween.

Out of this blend of rural paganism and medieval liturgy emerged the forerunner to modern trick-or-treating. In medieval Britain and Ireland, the practice of souling took hold: children and parish beggars traveled door to door requesting sweet pastries called soul cakes. This exchange was no youthful prank, but a solemn spiritual agreement: in return for each cake, the caller recited prayers to release the household’s deceased kin from Purgatory.

Turnips Before Pumpkins

No single icon embodies the global spread of the holiday quite like the glowing Jack-o'-lantern. Yet in ancient and medieval Europe, pumpkins did not even exist.

The carved lantern stems from the Irish folklore of Stingy Jack, a notorious trickster who deceived the devil twice to spare his own soul. Upon dying, denied entrance to heaven for his sins and turned away by an enraged devil at the gates of hell, Jack was condemned to wander the eternal dark, guided solely by an ember of hellfire placed inside a carved root vegetable.

That original lantern was typically a large turnip, rutabaga, or potato. Travelers navigating nighttime paths hollowed out these stubborn, fibrous roots, carved grotesque faces into their sides, and placed burning embers within to keep shadows at bay.

The aesthetic transformation arrived in the mid-19th century. When over a million Irish emigrants fled the Great Famine for North America, they brought their customs along. In the New World, they encountered the native American pumpkin: large, spherical, soft-skinned, and far easier to carve than European turnips. The modern visual identity was permanently sealed.

Ancient Echoes Across the Iberian Peninsula

It is often assumed that illuminated vegetable lanterns reached Spain purely as an American pop-culture import via Hollywood cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. Ethnographic records tell a different story: across rural northern Spain, equivalent practices thrived long before the arrival of modern television.

Throughout Galicia, Asturias, León, Zamora, and parts of Castile and Extremadura, villagers held a longstanding tradition of hollowing out melons, marrows, and squash on the eve of All Souls' Day. Fitted with small candles, these lanterns were placed at crossroads, cemetery paths, or stone walls to guide souls or ward off the spectral procession known as the Santa Compaña. In Galicia, these figures were locally called calacairas.

This heritage saw a formal revival in the early 1990s when educator and researcher Rafael López Loureiro restored the celebration of Samaín in Cedeira (A Coruña), collecting testimonies from elders who recalled carving vegetable skulls as children in the 1940s and 1950s. What is frequently dismissed as a foreign trend was, in truth, modern society reconnecting with a deep folk tradition shared by chestnut festivals (magostos) and the ancestral reverence for winter's arrival.