The day of Halloween is a holiday celebrate by millions of children. While not every country keeps the Halloween tradition, millions of children and teens can be found trick-or-treating both in the United States and many other nations. While some love Halloween, there are some who are just as passionately opposed to it. Interesting to note are the pagan origins of this day which stretch back thousands of years to the ancient pagans who existed even before Jesus' day.
These are some historical facts about the origin of Halloween:
Halloween's roots date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain. It is said to have began with the Celts. The Celts lives around 2,000 years ago in what is now the United Kingdom, Ireland and northern France. The celebration at that time was on November 1 or October 31.
It was associated with the commencement of a cold winter, dark and affiliated with death of humans. The Celts had many superstitions and truly believed that on the night before, the boundary between the world of the living and dead were blurred. They believed that the ghosts or souls of the dead returned to the earth revisiting their homes. In addition to the presence of these evil spirits, Celts felt that the presence of these spirits made it easier for the Druids. These predictions were important for a primitive and uneducated people, such as the Celts. They celebration took on sinister significance, with demons of every type which were believed to be in an active state on that night of malevolent activity.
People burned bonfires on hilltops to scare off evil spirits and demons, and people sacrificed both crops and animal sacrifices to pagan Celtic gods. Costumes were worn during these ceremonies, and they usually consisted of animal heads and skins.
The name Halloween has its origins in the Catholic Church. By the ninth-century, the festival had been influenced the mixture of paganism and Christianity that had become a part of Catholicism. Immigrants then brought the customs associated with Halloween to the United States, . These then became popular around the late nineteenth century. Halloween has always been a holiday of evil. Because of the forgoing reasons and the history of Halloween, many Christians of various genres, do not celebrate the holiday.
This article was written by John Scott, a writer who has a BA in Social Science from Thomas Edison State College, Trenton, NJ.
See also: Jehovah's Witnesses headlines (official site of Jehovah's Witnesses, not associated with this article).
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