Happy Halloween Friends!!

Are you ready to time travel?! I've always loved Halloween, so creating my Halloween yoga class was a huge thrill for me! But first, because I am a huge nerd, let's dive into some ancient Halloween history! The stories behind the myths, legends, and our modern traditions were fascinating to read! I didn't know much of this! Grab your warm cup of coffee, or tea, light some candles, dim the shades and immerse into some fascinating and shocking Halloween history!

 

 

 

 

Celtic History:

Halloween's traditions originated with the ancient Celtic spiritual festival of Samhain (a Gaelic word pronounced “sow-win”). The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago, mostly in the area that is now Ireland, Scotland, the United Kingdom and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1st.  In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III designated November 1 as a time to honor all of the saints. Soon, All Saints Day incorporated some of the traditions of Samhain. The evening before was known as All Hallows Eve, and later Halloween.

Samhain is usually celebrated from October 31 to November 1 to welcome in the harvest and usher in “the dark half of the year.” Celebrants believe that the barriers between the physical world and the spirit world become thinner during Samhain, allowing more interaction between humans and spirits from beyond our realm. Participants would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off ghosts. In addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort during the long, dark winter. To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops, the Celts wore costumes, and attempted to tell each other’s fortunes. When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.

 

 

Roman History:

By A.D. 43, the Roman Empire had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the 400 years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain. The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple, and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of bobbing for apples that is practiced today on Halloween.

 

 

American History:

The celebration of Halloween was extremely limited in colonial New England because of the rigid Protestant belief systems there. Halloween was much more common in Maryland and the southern colonies. As the beliefs and customs of different European ethnic groups and the Indigenous natives meshed, a distinctly American version of Halloween began to emerge. The first celebrations included “play parties,” which were public events held to celebrate the harvest. Neighbors would share stories of the dead, tell each other’s fortunes, dance and sing. Colonial Halloween festivities also featured the telling of ghost stories and mischief-making of all kinds. By the middle of the 19th century, annual autumn festivities were common, but Halloween was not yet celebrated everywhere in the country. Young women believed that on Halloween they could divine the name or appearance of their future husband by doing tricks with yarn, apple parings or mirrors. In the late 1800s, there was a move in America to mold Halloween into a holiday more about community and neighborly get-togethers than about ghosts, pranks and superstitious craft. In the second half of the 19th century, America was flooded with new immigrants, especially the millions of Irish (many descendants of Samhain traditions) fleeing the Irish Potato Famine, helped to popularize the celebration of Halloween nationally. 

 

 

 

The Stories Behind Halloween Legends, Myths & Modern Traditions!

 

 

Jack-O-Lanterns & Pumpkin Carving

The practice of carving faces into vegetables became associated with Halloween in Ireland and Scotland around the 1800s. Jack-o-lanterns originated from an Irish myth about a man nicknamed “Stingy Jack,” who tricked the Devil and was forced to roam the earth with only a burning coal in a turnip to light his way. People began to make their own versions of Jack’s lanterns by carving scary faces into turnips or potatoes and placing them into windows or near doors to frighten away Stingy Jack and other wandering evil spirits. Irish immigrants brought the tradition to America, home of the pumpkin, and it became an integral part of Halloween festivities.Pumpkins with ghoulish faces illuminated by candles are a sure sign of the Halloween season. People have been making jack-o’-lanterns at Halloween for centuries.

According to the story, Stingy Jack invited the Devil to have a drink with him. True to his name, Stingy Jack didn’t want to pay for his drink, so he convinced the Devil to turn himself into a coin that Jack could use to buy their drinks. Once the Devil did so, Jack decided to keep the money and put it into his pocket next to a silver cross, which prevented the Devil from changing back into his original form. Jack eventually freed the Devil, under the condition that he would not bother Jack for one year and that, should Jack die, he would not claim his soul. The next year, Jack again tricked the Devil into climbing into a tree to pick a piece of fruit. While he was up in the tree, Jack carved a sign of the cross into the tree’s bark so that the Devil could not come down until the Devil promised Jack not to bother him for ten more years.

 

 Dressing in Costumes

 

  

For the record, costumes at the turn of the century = TERRIFYING. I had a hard time selecting photos to place here! 

Ok, moving on! The tradition of dressing in costume for Halloween has both European and Celtic roots. Hundreds of years ago, winter was an uncertain and frightening time. Food supplies often ran low and, for the many people afraid of the dark, the short days of winter were full of constant worry. On Halloween, when it was believed that ghosts came back to the earthly world, people thought that they would encounter ghosts if they left their homes. To avoid being recognized by these ghosts, people would wear masks when they left their homes after dark so that the ghosts would mistake them for fellow spirits. On Halloween, to keep ghosts away from their houses, people would place bowls of food outside their homes to appease the ghosts and prevent them from attempting to enter.

Costumes and disguises have figured into Halloween celebrations since the holiday's earliest days. There were costumes for many occasions, and dress balls and costume masquerades were much more popular than they are now. Halloween costumes back then were more specifically geared toward spooky themes (as opposed to current events), and mostly homemade. The goal wasn’t necessarily to dress up as a particular creature or character, but rather to conceal identity in a spooky way that evoked themes like ghosts, witches, pumpkins, black cats and the moon. There would be moon symbols, darker fabrics for some costumes; anything that you could get and make that would kind of suggest or replicate something dark and otherworldly.

Costumes in the early 20th century and beyond also sometimes sought to portray other cultures—and races—in a way that is now recognized to be insensitive and often racist. Americans culturally appropriated turbans and other symbols of the “Far East,” reflecting contemporary fascination with Egypt as an “exotic” place. While people used makeup and costumes to take on different personas, it was usually a homemade effort. The only commercial costumes available in the early 20th century were paper masks or aprons for children. The goal wasn’t necessarily to look like a ghost or a goblin, but to look creepy and hide the identity of the person beneath the mask. Disguises were especially important for kids and teens, who often spent Halloween night playing tricks by throwing flour at people, stealing neighbors’ fences or even stealing remains.

This changed during the Great Depression, particularly after 1933. That Halloween, hundreds of teenage boys flipped over cars, sawed off telephone poles and engaged in other acts of vandalism across the country. Concerned adults started organizing neighborhood activities like trick-or-treating, haunted houses and costume parties to keep young people from making trouble. This new focus also led to new types of costumes for kids.

 Around the same time neighborhoods began organizing activities such as haunted houses to keep kids safe and occupied, costumes became more important (and less abstract and scary). They began to take the form of things children would have seen and enjoyed, like characters from popular radio shows, comics and movies. In the 1950s, mass-produced box costumes became more affordable, so more kids began to use them to dress up as princesses, mummies, clowns or more specific characters like Batman and Frankenstein’s monster. In the following decades, costumes were created to connect the public to current pop culture, tv, music, and movie characters, themes, and public icons.

 

Trick-or-Treating

Borrowing from European traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to house asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became today’s “trick-or-treat” tradition. Young women believed that on Halloween they could divine the name or appearance of their future husband by doing tricks with yarn, apple parings or mirrors. In the late 1800s, there was a move in America to mold Halloween into a holiday more about community and neighborly get-togethers than about ghosts, pranks and gore. At the turn of the century, Halloween parties for both children and adults became the most common way to celebrate the day. Parties focused on games, foods of the season and festive costumes. Parents were encouraged by newspapers and community leaders to take anything “frightening” or “grotesque” out of Halloween celebrations. Because of these efforts, Halloween lost most of its superstitious and religious overtones by the beginning of the twentieth century.

By the 1950s, town leaders had successfully limited vandalism and Halloween had evolved into a holiday directed mainly at the young. Due to the high numbers of young children during the fifties baby boom, parties moved from town civic centers into the classroom or home, where they could be more easily accommodated. Between 1920 and 1950, the centuries-old practice of trick-or-treating was also revived. Trick-or-treating was a relatively inexpensive way for an entire community to share the Halloween celebration. In theory, families could also prevent tricks being played on them by providing the neighborhood children with small treats.

  

 Black Cats

 

 

Halloween has always been a holiday filled with mystery, magic and superstition. It began as a Celtic end-of-summer festival during which people felt especially close to deceased relatives and friends. For these friendly spirits, they set places at the dinner table, left treats on doorsteps and along the side of the road and lit candles to help loved ones find their way back to the spirit world. Today’s Halloween ghosts are often depicted as more fearsome and malevolent, and our customs and superstitions are scarier too. We avoid crossing paths with black cats afraid that they might bring us bad luck. This idea has its roots in the Middle Ages when many people believed that witches avoided detection by turning themselves into black cats. We try not to walk under ladders for the same reason. This superstition may have come from the ancient Egyptians who believed that triangles were sacred (it also may have something to do with the fact that walking under a leaning ladder tends to be fairly unsafe). And around Halloween, especially, we try to avoid breaking mirrors, stepping on cracks in the road or spilling salt.

 

 Haunted Houses

 

 

The Great Depression was a time of great economic and social change that affected many parts of American life—including Halloween. Parents, concerned about their sons running amok on All Hallows' Eve, organized haunted houses or trails to keep them off the streets. Halloween had long been a night of revelry for adults and children, seen as a positive outlet for young men to blow off steam. This ranged from stealing gates off their hinges to stealing deceased remains. In 1879, about 200 boys in Kentucky stopped a train by laying a stuffed body across the railroad tracks. In 1900, medical students at the University of Michigan stole a headless corpse from the anatomy lab and propped it up against the building’s front doors.

There were plenty of people who didn’t see this as harmless fun before the Great Depression. However, the economic disaster exacerbated young men’s Halloween antics, leading to increased public concern and anger. In 1933, parents were outraged when hundreds of teenage boys flipped over cars, sawed-off telephone poles and engaged in other acts of vandalism across the country. People began to refer to that year’s holiday as “Black Halloween,” similarly to the way they referred to the stock market crash four years earlier as "Black Tuesday.” Some cities considered banning Halloween altogether. Yet in many communities, the response was to organize Halloween activities for young people so that they didn’t run amok. They started to organize trick-or-treating, parties, costume parades—and yes—haunted houses to keep them busy.

 

“Hang old fur, strips of raw liver on walls, where one feels his way to dark steps,” advised a 1937 party pamphlet on how to create a “trail of terror.” “Weird moans and howls come from dark corners, damp sponges and hair nets hung from the ceiling touch his face… Doorways are blockaded so that guests must crawl through a long dark tunnel.” Haunted or spooky public attractions already had some precedent in Europe. Starting in the 1800s, Marie Tussaud’s wax museum in London featured a “Chamber of Horrors” with decapitated figures from the French Revolution. In 1915, a British amusement ride manufacturer created an early haunted house, complete with dim lights, shaking floors and demonic screams.

 

Witches Riding Brooms

 

The evil green-skinned witch flying on her magic broomstick may be a Halloween icon—and a well-worn stereotype. But the actual history behind how witches came to be associated with such an everyday household object is anything but dull. It’s not clear exactly when the broom itself was first invented, but the act of sweeping goes back to ancient times when people likely used bunches of thin sticks, reeds and other natural fibers to sweep aside dust or ash from a fire or hearth. This household task even shows up in the New Testament, which dates to the first and second centuries A.D.  The word broom comes from the actual plant, or shrub, that was used to make many early sweeping devices. It gradually replaced the Old English word besom, though both terms appear to have been used until at least the 18th century. From the beginning, brooms and besoms were associated primarily with women, and this ubiquitous household object became a powerful symbol of female domesticity. Despite this, the first witch to confess to riding a broom or besom was a man: Guillaume Edelin. Edelin was a priest from Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris. He was arrested in 1453 and tried for witchcraft after publicly criticizing the church’s warnings about witches. His confession came under torture, and he eventually repented but was still imprisoned for life.

By the time of Edelin’s “confession,” the idea of witches riding around on broomsticks was already well established. The earliest images of broom riding dates to 1451, when two illustrations appeared in the French poet Martin Le Franc’s manuscript Le Champion des Dames (The Defender of Ladies). In the two drawings, one woman soars through the air on a broom; the other flies aboard a plain white stick. Both wear headscarves that identify them as Waldensians, members of a Christian sect founded in the 12th century who were branded as heretics by the Catholic Church, partly because they allowed women to become priests.

Anthologist Robin Skelton suggests the association between witches and brooms may have roots in a pagan fertility ritual, in which rural farmers would leap and dance astride poles, pitchforks or brooms in the light of the full moon to encourage the growth of their crops. This “broomstick dance,” she writes, became confused with common accounts of witches flying through the night on their way to orgies and other illicit meetings.

 

Bats, Vampires & Werewolves

Bats were likely present at the earliest proto-Halloween celebrations, not just symbolically but literally. As part of Samhain, Celts lit large bonfires, which attracted insects, which in turn, attracted bats. Soon spotting bats became connected with the festival. Medieval folklore expanded upon the eeriness of bats with a number of superstitions built around the belief that bats were harbingers of death. 

The San Francisco Call (San Francisco, CA), October 29, 1899.

Generally speaking, vampires are known as evil mythological beings who wander the world at night searching for blood to feed upon. Most of us equate all vampires with the most infamous of them, Count Dracula. He was the legendary subject of Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, published in 1897. But the truth is that the history of vampires far outdates Bram Stoker. 

Most of us have heard of Vlad the Impaler, the alleged inspiration for Stoker’s Dracula. Vlad Dracula was born in Transylvania, Romania and ruled periodically from 1456-1462. He was known for being brutally cruel and earned his nickname because it was his favorite way to kill his enemies. That’s right, good ole Vlad liked to impale people with wooden stakes. 

Vampire legend picked up steam through the Middle Ages and it was helped along by the plague. You see, the black death was often accompanied by bleeding mouth lesions. To the uneducated masses, this was a sure sign of vampirism. 

According to History.com, researchers have pointed to porphyria, a blood disorder, causing severe blisters on the skin when exposed to sunlight, as a disease that could be connected to the vampire legend. Interestingly, or is it disgustingly, some symptoms of porphyria can be temporarily relieved by ingesting blood. 

People did not take chances when it came to a suspected vampire’s death. Most remains were either disinterred to search for signs of vampirism, staked through the heart or burned, ya know, just in case! 

Today we are still interested in the vampire, off the top of my head I can think of several interpretations: “The Lost Boys” (cults classic 80’s film), “Interview with a Vampire”, “True Blood”, and of course, the sparkly vampires of “Twilight.” There seems to be a morbid fascination with these blood drinking dynamos.

Werewolves as we know them are, according to legend, people who morph into vicious, formidable wolves. Others suggest that they are some sort of mutant combination of human and wolf. Generally, they are bloodthirsty beasts, hell bent on killing anything in their path. Cursed shapeshifters with no control. A wolf only in the light of the full moon. 

Werewolves show up very early in history, in fact, they date all the way back to the oldest known Western prose, The Epic of Gilgamesh. In this prose, Gilgamesh rejected a potential lover because she had turned her previous mate into a wolf. Even if that isn’t the exact interpretation that we have of werewolves today, they also show up as early as Greek Mythology. 

In Greek Mythology werewolves are introduced in the Legend of Lycaon. According to the myth, Lycaon, the son of Pelasgus, angered the god Zeus when he served him a meal made from the remains of a sacrificed boy. I mean, who wouldn’t be angered by that? As punishment, the furious Zeus turned Lycaon and his sons into wolves.

German folklore holds one of the most notorious werewolves in the form of, Peter Stubbe. According to legend Stubbe turned into a wolf at night and devoured many of the citizens of Bedburg, Germany. Eventually, some hunters claimed that they saw Stubbe shapeshift into a wolf. 

There are sightings and reports of these mythological beasts yearly, to this day. Hollywood hasn’t helped with classics like “The Wolf Man”, “An American Werewolf in Paris”, The “Under World” franchise, “Harry Potter”, and oh yeah, “Twilight.” So, basically, these are all creepy, so bats, vampires, & were are tied to Halloween. haha!

 

Lesser Known Matchmaking & Fortune Telling

 

But what about the Halloween traditions and beliefs that today’s trick-or-treaters have forgotten all about? Many of these obsolete rituals focused on the future instead of the past and the living instead of the dead. In particular, many had to do with helping young women identify their future husbands and reassuring them that they would someday—with luck, by next Halloween—be married. In 18th-century Ireland, a matchmaking cook might bury a ring in her mashed potatoes on Halloween night, hoping to bring true love to the diner who found it.

In Scotland, fortune-tellers recommended that an eligible young woman name a hazelnut for each of her suitors and then toss the nuts into the fireplace. The nut that burned to ashes rather than popping or exploding, the story went, represented the girl’s future husband. (In some versions of this legend, the opposite was true: The nut that burned away symbolized a love that would not last.) Another tale had it that if a young woman ate a sugary concoction made out of walnuts, hazelnuts and nutmeg before bed on Halloween night she would dream about her future husband. Young women tossed apple-peels over their shoulders, hoping that the peels would fall on the floor in the shape of their future husbands’ initials; tried to learn about their futures by peering at egg yolks floating in a bowl of water and stood in front of mirrors in darkened rooms, holding candles and looking over their shoulders for their husbands’ faces. Other rituals were more competitive. At some Halloween parties, the first guest to find a burr on a chestnut-hunt would be the first to marry. At others, the first successful apple-bobber would be the first down the aisle. Of course, whether we’re asking for romantic advice or trying to avoid seven years of bad luck, each one of these Halloween superstitions relies on the goodwill of the very same “spirits” whose presence the early Celts felt so keenly.

 

Halloween was almost banned

 

 

As the Louisville Short Line chugged its way through Newport, Kentucky, the passenger train’s engineer peered out into the dark night of October 31, 1879, and saw something truly frightening—a body lying across the railroad tracks. Pulling on the brake with all his might, the engineer halted his iron horse in the nick of time and jumped out of the locomotive. As he rushed to the lifeless figure, the train operator quickly discovered why it wasn’t moving. It wasn’t a person at all, but a stuffed figure placed there by 200 boys hiding along the tracks, who started to howl with laughter at their Halloween trick. Although the juveniles had threatened his safety and that of his passengers, the engineer did not utter a single admonishment. After all, he engaged in similar antics when he was a boy. Such things were to be expected on Halloween during the Gilded Age when the ghoulish holiday was free of candy and full of pranks, vandalism and even violence. When immigrants from Scotland and Ireland brought their Halloween traditions to the US in the middle of the 1800s, they celebrated as they did back in their homelands—not with costumed children going door-to-door for sweets but by pulling pranks.

 

Across the American countryside in the latter 1800s, common Halloween tricks included placing farmers’ wagons and livestock on barn roofs, uprooting vegetables in backyard gardens and tipping over outhouses—be they occupied or not. In some regions, so many gates were taken off their hinges or opened to allow livestock to escape that October 31 was known as “Gate Night.” A protestant minister in Ohio awoke after one Halloween to discover his front porch decorated with beer signs and towering pyramids of beer kegs. The advent of the automobile delivered further opportunities for mischief such as removing manhole covers from streets, deflating tires and erecting fake detour signs to confuse motorists.

At first, the pranking was pretty innocent and limited to rural places. But as metropolitan areas expanded, kids took the pranking into cities and it became more destructive with setting fires, breaking glass, and tripping pedestrians. Boys ran through city streets splattering people with bags of flour or black stockings filled with ashes. One year, youths in Kansas waxed streetcar tracks on a steep hill causing a vehicle to slip and crash into another streetcar, seriously injuring a conductor. The malicious violence and looting connected with Halloween only grew worse during the economic free fall of the Great Depression. By 1933, the holiday had become so destructive that cities were considering banning it. Many of the cities were smart enough, though, that they thought that while banning might not work, they might be able to buy these kids off.

During the 1930s, civic and religious authorities, community organizations and neighborhood families began to program parties, carnivals and costume parades on Halloween to keep kids out of trouble. There was not a lot of money during the Great Depression so people pooled their resources and staged house-to-house parties. The first house might give out costumes such as a white sheet to be ghosts, or soot to smudge on kids’ faces. The next house might give out treats, the next might have a basement set up as a tiny haunt. This starts to morph into kids getting dressed up and going house to house trick-or-treating.

In the midst of World War II, youngsters took pledges to support the soldiers and sailors abroad by not engaging in Halloween vandalism. Children in Massachusetts vowed to “back our fighting men by observing Halloween as they would want me to. I will share in good, clean fun and merriment, fight against waste and damage!” While Halloween itself grew tamer as trick-or-treating became part of the American culture in the 1950s, the mischief didn’t disappear completely. It just moved to the night before Halloween. Kids wanted both the trick-or-treating and their pranking, so they moved it to October 30, although it seemed to be a Midwest and East Coast thing. It didn’t really make it to the West Coast.

In parts of the Northeast, October 30 became known as Mischief Night. It was called Goosey Night in parts of New Jersey. Harkening back to the old Scottish pranking tradition, it was even known as Cabbage Night in some locales. While the vandalism was usually along the lines of soaping windows, spraying shaving cream, throwing eggs at houses or tossing toilet paper over trees and bushes, it took a truly dark turn in Detroit and other Michigan cities such as Saginaw and Flint, which were set ablaze in what became known as Devil’s Night.

 

During the 1970s and 1980s, arsonists turned the Detroit night sky a Halloween orange by setting fire to trash cans, dumpsters and abandoned buildings. The destruction peaked in 1984 when more than 800 fires were set across the city in a three-night arson spree. Detroit responded by instituting dusk-to-dawn curfews for unaccompanied youths under 18 and mobilizing a city watch. With garden hoses at the ready and vigilant eyes, more than 30,000 volunteers participated in neighborhood patrols in 1990. Thanks to these continued efforts, the number of fires around Halloween in Detroit have steadily decreased to near-normal levels on what city leaders now call Angels’ Night.

 Phew! Halloween has seen some times, ya'll! Good grief! On to more fun things!

  

Bobbing for Apples

The game of bobbing for apples has been a staple at Halloween parties for many years, but its origins are more rooted in love and romance. The game traces back to a courting ritual that was part of the Roman festival honoring Pomona, the goddess of agriculture and abundance. While multiple versions existed, the gist was that young men and women would be able to predict their future relationships based on the game. When the Romans conquered the British Isles in 43 AD, the Pomona festival blended with the similarly timed Samhain, a precursor to Halloween. Each apple represented a potential husband or suitor. The number of tries it took to bite into an apple indicated the fate of the person's love life.

Candy Apples

 

Candied apples. Evening Star (Washington, DC), October 28, 1956.

 

For centuries, people have been coating fruit in syrup as a means of preservation. But during the Roman festival of Pomona, the goddess was often represented by and associated with apples, her name derives from the Latin word for apple “pomum” and the fruit is at the heart of harvest celebrations. It is believed that candy apples were invented accidentally in 1908 by William W. Kolb, a candymaker in Newark, New Jersey. As the story goes, Kolb was experimenting with red cinnamon candy to sell at Christmastime and he dipped apples on sticks into the red glaze and put them in his shop window to showcase his new candy. But instead of selling the candies, he ended up selling the apples to customers who thought they looked good enough to eat. They became fashionable treats for Halloween starting in the early 1900s and they remained popular into the 1970s, until now.

Devouring Candy

 

The act of going door-to-door for handouts has long been a part of Halloween revelries. But until the mid-20th century, the “treats” children received were not necessarily candy. Things like fruit, nuts, coins, and toys were just as likely to be given out. Trick-or-treating rose in popularity in the 1950s and it inspired candy companies to market small, individually wrapped candies. People began to favor the confections out of convenience, but candy did not dominate at the exclusion of all other treats until the 1970s when parents started fearing anything unwrapped.

 

Candy Corn

 

A candymaker at the Wunderle Candy Company in Philadelphia is sometimes credited with inventing the tri-colored candy in the 1880s. But candy corn did not become a widespread sensation until the Goelitz Company brought the candy to the masses in 1898. Candy corn was originally called “Chicken Feed” and it sold in boxes with the slogan “Something worth crowing for.” Initially, it was just an autumnal candy because of corn’s association with harvest time. Candy corn later became Halloween-specific when trick-or-treating grew in popularity in the U.S. during the 1950s. 

 

 

Halloween has seen massive transformation over the centuries! But the foremost message after reading all of this: BE SAFE AND HAVE FUN! 

xoxo, Sasha