Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween

231 Pages·2012·3.74 MB·English

by  Lisa Morton

trick or treat

trick or treat
a history oſ halloween
lisa morton
reaktion books
Published by
Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London ec1v 0dx, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2012
Copyright © Lisa Morton 2012
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publishers.
Printed and bound in China
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Morton, Lisa, 1958–
Trick or treat: a history of Halloween.
1. Halloween –History.
I. Title
394.2’646-dc23
isbn978 1 78023 047 4
Contents
Introduction 7
1
Halloween: The Misunderstood Festival 9
2
Snap-apple Night and November Eve:
Halloween in the British Isles 30
3
Trick or Treat in the New World 64
4
La Toussaint, Allerheiligenand Tutti i Santi:
The Global Celebration 116
5
Dias de los Muertos 138
6
From Burns to Burton: Halloween and
Popular Culture 153
references 201
acknowledgements 213
photo acknowledgements 215
index 217
Halloween jack-o’-lanterns.
Introduction
Halloween is surely unique among festivals and holidays. While other
popular calendar celebrations, including Christmas and Easter, have
mixed pagan and Christian traditions, only Halloween has essentially
split itself down the middle, offering up a secular or pagan festival
on the night of 31October and sombre religious observance on the
day of 1November. As with Valentine’s Day, many of those who cele-
brate Halloween are unaware of its Catholic history or meaning; but
while Valentine’s Day has remained recognizably the same for at least
a century, Halloween has transformed over and over again. What
began as a pagan New Year’s celebration and a Christian commemor-
ation of the dead has over time served as a harvest festival, a romantic
night of mystery for young adults, an autumnal party for adults, a
costumed begging ritual for children, a season for exploring fears in
a controlled environment and, most recently, a heavily commercialized
product exported by the United States to the rest of the world.
Halloween also has the unenviable distinction of being the
most demonized of days: Christian groups decry it as ‘The Devil’s
Birthday’, authorities fear its effect on public safety and nationalist
leaders around the world denounce its importation for conflicting
with their own native traditions. Some of these concerns may be
valid, but they are all rooted in a history that compounds confusion
and error with occasional fact. Perhaps because Halloween has
always been connected with the macabre, those who have chronicled
it in the past have frequently been less interested in accuracy than
in dramatic and ghoulish ramblings.
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trick or treat
Despite a history extending back well over a millennium, it’s
only been within the last three decades that historians, folklorists
and writers have begun to take the study of Halloween seriously.
Even in that brief period of time, the day’s identity has shifted,
making it difficult to produce a comprehensive and up-to-date
overview. Within the last year alone, Halloween has expanded into
parts of the world where it was previously unknown, and in its main
home, America, industries spawned by Halloween are starting to
move beyond mere October celebrations. Halloween is truly becom-
ing more than just a (mostly American) mark on the calendar; it’s
on the verge of blossoming into a global subculture.
Trick or Treat: The History of Halloweenis the first book to look
at both the history of the festival and its growth around the world
in the twenty-first century. As such, it will hopefully serve to fill a
gap in the understanding of Halloween, and to capture as detailed
an image as possible of where it stands at this time – because, given
the astonishing speed with which the festival continues to transform
and expand, it’s an image that will undoubtedly change again soon.
8