WYSO's Eichelberger Center for Community Voices is launching a new series called Miami Valley Celebrates. We’ll be traveling the area to learn the origins of popular holidays, as well as the unique ways they’re celebrated in the Miami Valley.
Today, for Halloween, Wright State History professor Noeleen McIlvenna — who grew up in Northern Ireland — explains how an ancient Celtic holiday has changed and stayed the same over the centuries.
Transcript (edited lightly for length and clarity)
Noeleen McIlvenna: Halloween was first called Samhain. It's a Celtic festival. It's the coming of the darkness, the coming of winter. And so it was celebrated with a certain level of creepiness. The idea was that perhaps the graves would open as you come into the season of much, much longer nights than days. This is the season for the undead and for the dead. And that wasn't exactly scary. You just had to make your peace with those people.
Then all kinds of little festivities developed. The Bonfire was the big one because November 1st is the date, but the Irish calendar in those days started at sunset. So, at sunset at the beginning of November 1st, you would have this bonfire.
And the foods—this has kind of continued into the modern day—they had some kind of cake that had little secrets buried in it. There was always a ring and a coin, and different prizes. So, if you got the coin, you were going to be rich for the year ahead. If you got the ring, maybe you were going to get married. You were going to get love at least.
There was also a little bit of this idea of going door-to-door and the neighbors would have given you gifts and treats. It wasn't trick-or-treating exactly. There weren’t any costumes. It was just a festival where people celebrate things, and this was a festival at nighttime.
That, of course, morphs first of all with Christianity. What the Catholic Church did was they came over to Ireland, and they morphed a certain amount of these holidays into Catholic holidays. So, we have All Saints Day on November 1st. So, All Hallows Eve, the day before All Saints Day— which is a holy day of obligation, you have to go to mass and everything—is Halloween.
My mom was a devoted Catholic, so we had Halloween, but you did have to go to church the next morning. It was all part of it. And then the second day, All Souls Day, you go back and you pray for everybody who is stuck in purgatory to get them over the hump and into heaven. So, the whole two or three days were as important as the festival. They're not unconnected.
And then as it comes to America, which is more Protestant, Catholicism is sort of drained out of it, and it becomes a secular thing. That's not unlike Christmas. Lots of people who are not Christian love Santa and put up a tree and give each other gifts. You can have it as a religious holiday, and you can have it very easily as not a religious holiday.
So, coming to America and seeing how Irish Americans arrived in the mid-19th century and how gradually it has morphed into Halloween here is interesting because of these similarities.
You don't have the bonfire, but you have the trick-or-treating, and the trick-or-treating is this idea that a lot of people dress as monsters, vampires, the undead, ghosts.
It's the creepy night for the black cats, and yet we're all having fun with it. And Samhain was not much different in the essence of it.
