Our American StoriesOn this episode of Our American Stories, why do we participate in these strange celebrations every Halloween? Lesley Bannatyne is the author of Halloween: An American Holiday, An American History, and Lisa Morton is the author of Trick Or Treat: A History of Halloween.
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This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, including yours. Send them to our American Stories dot com. Today we're going to bring to light the Halloween stories that have been hiding in the dark, answering the question why do we participate in these strange celebrations every Halloween season. Here to tell the story are two of the foremost authorities on Halloween, Leslie Vantine and Lisa Morton. Leslie is the author of Halloween, an American Holiday and American History. Lisa is the author of Trick or Treat, A History of Halloween. Here's Leslie and Lisa with the story of Halloween.
I'm Leslie Vanatyne. I've been looking at, researching and writing about Halloween for over thirty five years now and it's still interesting to me. And so I guess if you wanted to start the story of Halloween, you could go back to Sowen, which was a time of year in northwestern Europe. That's Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany. It means summer's end. Sowen means summer's end and it was time of year around November first where tribes would move their livestock back to winter quarters to keep them safe, and they would gather together. It was kind of a little bit like our Thanksgiving in that people would come together, they'd play games, eat, drink, tell stories, and because it was a big community kind of day or festival, the dead were naturally part of it. And there was a belief that the other world was especially present at this time, at summer's end, because we were going into the dark and dangerous season, and it's always good to consult with the ancestors when you're going into something dangerous.
Salin, which by the way, is spelled sam hai n. It looks like it should be pronounced sam hayne, but it's not. It is Salin, was a day that they did indeed celebrate on October thirty first. Their festivals started when the sun went down, so it began actually on the evening of October thirty first, and then spilled over into November first, and it was a night when they believed that the veil between the worlds was at its thinnest and that things could cross over and cause real mischief. On that night, they believed in really malicious fairies called the She and a lot of people have heard of the banshee that actually translates to a female fairy, and these fairies were really nasty little things. We're not talking Disney tinkerbe all kind of things here. We're talking things that would come over and burn down their palaces. There's a famous story about that. There's another story about a hero who is sent out by the King on sw and Eve to place a cord around the foot of a corpse, which is something that no one else has been able to do. And when he does this, the corpse comes to life and he lets it down and it takes it out to get a drink. It's thirsty, and it spits on people and kills them. This is an absolutely terrifying story, so it definitely had a very macabre element. Swan did and then when the Christians missionaries came in and they were anxious to convert these celts to their faith, and they had a doctrine of not just trying to stamp out existing celebrations, but of trying to co opt them. And Pope Gregory the third was one of the big people who was behind this doctrine of trying to co op these existing celebrations, and so they sent the missionaries in, and they moved the date of their Saints celebration. Originally, All Saints Day was celebrated on May thirteenth, which was an old Roman holiday associated with the dead, but they moved it to November first, and so it would begin on the eve before, and they did that to try and co opt Soalen and it was not entirely successful. Interestingly enough, so a few centuries after that they added a second holiday, which is All Souls Day, and that actually happens on November two. All Souls Day also served the purpose of letting everyone celebrate their deceased loved ones, not just saints, so it had kind of a dual role there, and that became much more successful now they were starting to convert the Celts and so forth.
And All Saints State doesn't have a lot to do with Halloween, but it did give Halloween a time. Name for All Saints' Day is known in some countries as All Hallows. All Hallows means Saint or holy one, and so All Hallows Eve would be the eve before All Hallows Day all Saints Day. So Halloween comes from All Saints Day the name Halloween, but Halloween gets it's juju from All Souls Day, and so here you have the same kind of thing going on as what's going on with Swen is that the Church recognizes there's a time every year to honor the dead. There's several times, but in the fall as winters approaching. All Souls Day was instituted in about the eleventh century, and people have been visiting graveyards and remembering their loved ones and thinking of the dead for the last thousand years on that day and still do, of course in many Catholic countries there's still visitations to the graveyards. It's an important holiday and it's important time to remember the dead. So that comes along from sayn through the church becomes very popular throughout medieval times, so doesn't have anything to do with modern Halloween. Really they're separate. But what does is the eve of All Saints Day, the night going into this holy set of holidays which is Halloween. And like Marti Gras is to Lent, Halloween is to these really important church days. It's the time to have a party. It's secular time. It's fun time. It's gathered together, play games, eat, drink, tell stories before you go into the serious church holidays, we're gonna spend a lot of time indoors and praying.
And you've been listening to Leslie Benetteyne and Lisa Morton tell the story of Halloween. I love what they just described. Marti Gras is to lend as Halloween is to All Saints Day and all Souls Day. When we come back, more of the story of Halloween, how it came to be what it is today here on our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we're asking you to become a part of the our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and seventy six cents is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to our American Stories dot com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming. That's our American Stories dot Com. And we continue with our American Stories and the story of how Halloween came to be. Our two in house experts, Leslie Bennettyne and Lisa Morton continue with the story.
So when the church theorized about purgatory, this was a place where souls went to wait until they could either send to heaven or not. And when purgatory became an important concept in the church, it was critical for people to pray for their dead because if the harder they prayed, the more they prayed, the easier their loved ones would have to go into heaven. So the church actually created this interactive relationship between the living and the dead. It became part of Halloween this day, so if you pray for the dead, you can help them to heaven. There was a custom of begging house to house that was associated with All Souls Day, and in several of these processions, people could ask house to house for soul cakes. Give me, give me a piece of bread or a soul cake, and I'll say a prayer for the one you have lost. So there was this nice exchange, and it's also set a kind of precedent for house to house begging that we still see at Halloween today, only it's candies and there's no prayers for the dearly departed.
Now we have this thing coming in called All Hollows Eve, which eventually gets abbreviated into the name we know Halloween, and it was for the first few centuries and we're talking now around probably the thirteen fourteen, fifteen hundreds. It was a day that was somewhat similar to Salen, that was celebrated with feasting, with gatherings, with playing game. We know, for example, that bobbing for apples was around really early on, but we are also getting them keeping that more macab element. And one of the classic descriptions we have of an early Halloween celebration is a Robert Burns poem from seventeen eighty five called Halloween, and it talks about telling ghost stories and playing these fortune telling games. At the time, young people were obsessed with learning who they would end up marrying, so they would play these fortune telling games on Halloween night that would tell them who they might end up marrying. And the games sometimes were very macab. They might consist of calling on the devil. Some of them were more innocent. For example, they would set nuts out in front of a fireplace and they would name each of the nuts for a specific person, and depending on which nut cracked first, would indicate who they would end up marrying. And in fact, that was so popular that in some parts of the British Isles it was called Nutcrack Night rather than even Halloween or All Saints Eve or All Hallows Eve.
Another thing that was interesting about All Souls in All Saints was that it was Catholic, and so in Ireland, no problem whatsoever. But when Protestantism came in Martin Luther and in Scotland became Protestant, and in Protestantism, ghosts are slights of Satan, and so in Scotland you have this incredibly rich and scary superstition about witches, because if there were beings out that you couldn't see at this time of year, they were not good in Scotland. In Calvinism, these were agents of the devil, and the agents of the devil that they fixed on were witches. And so in Calvinist Scotland you've got this incredible witchcraft. Lord well was that stuck with Halloween to today? You know, that's where we first got the Halloween Witch. The first Halloween icon maybe is the ghost that you know, you're the spirit of someone in your past who's passed on. But the second is definitely the witch, and that came from Calvinist Scotland. So with this iconography of witchcraft in its association with Halloween, it's a nighttime thing, right. Halloween is a nighttime holiday. You have to celebrate it mostly after dark, and witchcraft is kind of something that happens in the dark, and so nocturnal animals and creatures get associated with it just over time and throughout mythology and folklore. So the images of the witch came down through the centuries and got more and more associated with cats and bats and moons and all sorts of things that you would find in the dark. That had a lot to do with just how people portrayed Halloween flater in magazines when there were drawings of it, and even later than that, in the nineteen thirties in America won we have this explosion of postcards and they needed graphic images, and all of a sudden we grew up with the witch, the moon, the cat, the that being part of Halloween.
And there is a final thing that cements the place of witches in Halloween, which is much more recent, which a lot of people may not realize how important this was. There is a nineteen thirty nine film that comes out called The Wizard of Oz and Margaret Hamilton's portrayal of the wicked Witch in that with the green skin and the huge black pointed hat and the black cloak and so forth, really created our image of the witch as we have it now. Prior to that, if you look at vintage drawings of Halloween witches, they're often in red, and they are usually depicted as being elderly but not quite so cronish looking, although there were also sexy young witches that were popular in the nineteen tens and twenties. And of course the black Cat and the Cauldron are also Halloween icons that come along with the witch. And there's also a story by Edgar Allan Poe which cements the reputation of the black Cat in regards to Halloween. So at this point people might be wondering, well, how does that end up becoming associated with things like the pumpkin, which is kind of now our king of Halloween icons. The pumpkin also comes to us from Ireland. Obviously they don't have pumpkins in Ireland. Pumpkins are a New World fruit and they had turnips though, and the Irish loved to play pranks on Halloween, and when the Irish came to America in the mid nineteenth century. In the eighteen forties, because of famine, they brought a lot of these halloween things with them, and the things they brought with them was pranks. And one of their favorite pranks was to take these turnips that grew in Ireland and carve a sort of spooky looking face into them, and then put a candle inside of that, and they would set that out somewhere at night on Halloween night, where an unwaried traveler or an unwary homeowner might stumble across this thing. And you can imagine that if you're out late at night and you suddenly turn a corner and you see this glowing face, it would give you a bit of a start. So they brought that with them to the New World, and of course when they arrived here and found these gorgeous, huge pumpkins, they were the perfect thing to replace the turnips. But there's another thing that's associated with the pumpkin that's really interesting, which is a legendary trickster story where we get the name Jack o Lantern comes from a famous legend of Jack the Trickster, and Jack was a blacksmith who had three times tricked the devil out of coming to claim his soul. But when Jack finally dies, it turns out that neither Heaven nor Hell wants anything to do with Jack. The devil agrees only to throw him a burning hell ember to light his way. And so Jack places this ember in this carved gourd and uses it to light his way as he eternally roams the earth. And that's how the name Jack o Lantern came about, being associated with these carved pumpkins.
In colonial America, Halloween was not a thing. There were Halloween, the secular holiday, the eve of All Halla's was not anything that anyone would celebrate. We were Puritans, you know, we didn't even celebrate Christmas. This is not going to happen.
And We've been listening to Leslie Bannettine and Lisa Morton tell the story of Halloween, and I'm learning things that I never knew about the Jack o' lantern, for instance, or the pumpkin. Great storytelling more of it to come, Leslie Vanattine and Lisa Morton. Leslie is the author of Halloween, an American Holiday and American History. Lisa is the author of Trick or Treat, A History of Halloween, the story of Halloween, how it came to be here in America, such a big, big celebration day. Here on our American stories, and we continue here with our American stories and the story of Halloween as brought to us by Leslie Bennettyne and Lisa Morton, both prolific authors and experts on the subject of all things Halloween. It's history right up to modern day times. Here's Leslie and Lisa to continue with the story.
As the colonies developed, and this the new nation developed, different colonies had different religious bents, and so in Catholic colonies like Maryland, for example, yes there was All Saints and All Souls state, but that's not Halloween. It's all Hallows in name. But it's a church holiday, and it had nothing to do with witches and ghosts and pumpkins and anything that we would recognize. Those are church holidays. The first was the Civil War, when so many people had lost so many family members, and in that war more than many many many other subsequent wars combined, everybody had lost somebody and they didn't know if they were dead or alive. There was so many missing people in the Civil War, so you know, where's my husband, where's my brother? Is he coming home?
Where's my son?
I can't find my son. And there was a huge interest in the dead, in spiritualism, in ghosts. All of this became really important to post Civil War Victorians who were bereft. So keep that in mind. We loved ghosts at that time, and then put the nail in the coffin. Was printing became cheap at that time. In the late eighteen hundreds, there were a million magazines. I exaggerate slightly. There were a lot of ladies, magazines and newspapers, all of looking for content. And when they discovered this ghostly Scottish they thought holiday that had to do with the spirit world and looking into the future. They just loved it. And so it was Victorian hostesses who started throwing the first Halloween themed parties. So let's get together and play games when we look into the future. Let's decorate by bringing the outdoors inside. Let's get cornstocks and pumpkins and all sorts of rural things, things from the country that we love, and let's throw a party on this weird night that we've heard about, this Halloween.
So these are all the things that we have coming over with the holiday. And you might think that maybe trick or treat, which is I think our greatest American addition to the holiday, stems directly from all of those things, but it actually does not. It comes from pranking. And it's a really strange history of how that comes about. The Irish who loved to play their pranks that caught on a lot in the nineteenth century, and American kids loved playing pranks, of course, and this spread throughout the entire country, and at first it was quite innocent. The prank playing in America was things like the kids would go out to a farm and they would maybe overturn an out house or tip over a cow, or one of their more elaborate pranks that they loved was to disassemble a gate and move it and reassemble at someplace like either the main street of the town or the top of a barn. And in fact, this one prank was so popular that Halloween was known as gate Night in many areas, and.
So tricks were really the first part of Halloween that we had in this country. And it was like every kid's right to go out under cover of darkness and take the gates off of their neighbors pigpens or pile stones up in the middle of the street, or put molasses on the church bench, or remove the church steps, or hang a rocking chair in the tree, or any number of pranks, and everyone would say, okay, it's Halloween. It's okay, it's just kids.
So it was all good fun at first. But then by the twentieth century, as America is becoming much more urbanized and more populated, these pranks move into the cities, and when they move into the cities, they become much less nice. Now they are about destroying things, about shattering glass bulbs and windows. They are about setting fires, tripping pedestrians, and by the thirties they are causing millions of dollars of damage. And this is also during the Great Depression, when a lot of these cities don't even have the money to pay for all of the damage that's resulting from this vandalism, and a lot of cities at this point considered dropping Halloween or trying to ban it. But fortunately there were a few places where cooler heads prevailed and said, you know, maybe we can buy these kids off instead of trying to ban this holiday, because that could backfire on us, which it would have.
And so every civic organization you can think of, PTA's, Kawana's Moose, Junior Chamber of Commerce, churches, hospitals, dance clubs, anything through started to throw Halloween parties for kids to keep them inside where they could be seen. So Halloween was always an outside in the dark event, and this was an effort to move Halloween indoors, actually to move it more towards younger children, to help younger children celebrate it. Let's just take a little bit of the danger out of this holiday, keep the kids where we can see them, and tame it down just a little bit. And there was an enormous coast to coast effort to throw Halloween parties for kids by civic work. It's actually very generous, you know, to do this, and to some extent it worked. I mean, there were creative ideas. Police would drive around in their cruisers in one city and hand out candy preemptively to children so that they wouldn't come throwing cabbages at doors or ringing doorbells and just trying to tame the whole situation down. Or radio programs sometimes would have call in shows where if you were home at say seven thirty or eight o'clock, and you called in, you could win a prize that keeps the child or the teenager inside where you can see them.
And they got together, and they a actually put out little pamphlets in many of the cities that would tell homeowners how to do this. So these little pamphlets would suggest that the homeowners get together. Again. We're still during the Great Depression, a lot of homeowners don't have money to spare for parties and so forth. But if enough of the houses got together in one street, they could put something together for the kids. And these were called house to house parties. And the way they would work was the first house might give the kids a very simple costume, probably just a sheet with two holes cut in it. The kids would get to be ghosts. The next house would give the kids maybe a little spooky entertainment, like they'd have the basement the lights shut off, a little thing where the kids would have to go through the basement, somebody might jump out and frighten them. This becomes kind of the very earliest version of our modern haunted attraction. And then the next house would give the kids a little treat well this was very popular. It caught off very quickly. Everyone started holding parties for kids. By nineteen thirty six we get the first mentioned in a national American magazine of the phrase trick or treat, which actually probably came down from Canada. The first recorded uses we have of it are in Canada, although they are not always in relation to kids in an actual costume.
And you've been listening to Lisa Morton, author of Trick or Treat, A History of Halloween, and Leslie Pratt Manattine, author of Halloween and American Holiday in American History. By the way, both of those books are available on Amazon dot com. Or are the usual suspects by all means, pick them up, read them. Great holiday material, great holiday reading material. When we come back, more of Leslie and Lisa on the story of Halloween. No, and we continue with our American stories and the story of Halloween and how it came to be. Leslie Bennetteyne and Lisa Morton continue with the storytelling.
Now here's the thing, like, how did trick or treat happen? From all of these parties, from all these mischief and tricks, and the town fathers and mothers trying to tamp it down. That never entirely worked. What really worked was involving each individual homeowner. So there were kids out on the street accosting people for money or food or treats, and accosting like hitting them on the back with a sock full of flour or you know, and asking them for something. So the thinking was, okay, so if this, if that's what they want, If they're out accosting people, banging on doors demanding things, and we're in our houses saying go away, go away, why not have something for them. Be you ready, have candy, have treats, bakes and brownies, make cookies, popcorn balls. When they come to your door, open it up, offer it. And that, in fact was what worked. But people had to be talked to do this.
So the whole ritual kids in a costume, going to a house saying trick or treat, being rewarded with a little sweet. That is in place by about nineteen thirty six, and it takes a few more years for it to become really widespread across the country, and then it gets put on hold during World War Two because sugar was rationed and it was very hard to get into the spirit of Halloween and get treats and so forth. But then at the end of the war it comes back with a vengeance because we now also have something called television that's coming in. And trick or treat was spread in part through early sitcoms. You can, for example, go look at a I think it's nineteen fifty episode of the Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and you can see a really early, kind of strange looking form of trick or treat. The kids are standing at the door in the afternoon and their costumes are not quite finished. But it definitely paved the way for this whole institution of trick or treat. Also, the ca companies come in now because mom sitting at home does not want to bake all day. She doesn't want to spend her day making popcorn balls or candied apples or donuts to give to these kids. It's much easier to just go out and buy a bag of pre made candies and to pass those out.
There was a cartoon that was incredibly popular culture contreat. It was a Donald Duck cartoon where Hueye doing Louis Are, you know, sending off small explosives and it kind of taught what you're supposed to do with kids who are pulling tricks is to offer them candy. This is what we do. And that cartoon was shown in movie theaters for for a long time and thousands and thousand, thousands of people saw it, and so we kind of started to get the pictures. This is how you take care of tricks, and it's fun for kids, and it's actually fun for the homeowner who doesn't have to like, put up with his doorbell ringing, you know, every thirty seconds on Halloween night, or worry that if he doesn't open the door to kids that they'll remove his fence posts or steps by morning. A la la la lay wound lawns. So by nineteen sixty four, it was almost Unamerican not to turn your porch light on it folloween.
So we now have this combination of these sitcoms and these candy companies and costume companies also come in and make it much easier. Again, Mom doesn't have to sew nosh, can just go out to the store buy a costume. The kids can buy their favorite character, because now the costume companies are merchandising cartoon characters, historical characters, things like that, and trick or treat becomes a real institution for about the next twenty years, and then a couple of things happen to change trick or treating. In the early sixties, there is a woman named Helen File who gives out. She gets tired of older kids coming to her house on trick or Treat and she gives them aunt buttons, and she is doing this just because she doesn't like these older kids trick or treating, but it becomes sort of trendsmogrified into the story of the anonymous psycho who is spiking apples with razor blades, and then in the early seventies that gets added to again with the story of Ronald O'Brien who is a young boy who is poisoned by his own father who who is in for an insurance scheme and puts arsenic in his children's pixie sticks. And even though it was proven pretty quickly that this was the father doing this, it again becomes a notion that there are anonymous psychos out there who are tampering with your kids treats on Halloween, and it really knocks trigger treating back, even though a lot of hospitals are now stepping up and saying things like, well, X ray your kids candy on Halloween Night. It does set the whole idea of Halloween Night being just for kids back pretty severely, and that kind of gets a final blow in nineteen seventy eight when one movie changes a holiday, which is something that I don't know has happened with any other holiday. John Carpenter releases Halloween, and now we have, for the first time a look at Halloween as something that is absolutely terrifying and very adult. And it kind of cements that transformation of the holiday from something that is celebrated mainly by kids to something that is much more a sort of celebration of fear for adults. And that continues throughout the seventies with counterculture groups claiming the holiday, and also into the eighties when beer companies come along and realize that there is a lot of money to be made off of Halloween. The Corps Company was looking for a holiday that they could turn into their version of the Super Bowl, and their first attempt at marketing beer to Halloween did not work. It was something that a few people may remember a silver Bullet campaign. But then in about nineteen eighty six, they got smart enough to hire Elvira, and as soon as they hired Elvira and put standies of her in markets throughout the country, Halloween became a beer holiday. It was huge, and it was one of the things again that morphed this from being something for kids into something much more adult oriented. Beer sales were huge after they hired Elvira. She was the magic marketing tip there and using her and her image and so forth allowed them to take over Super Bowl and Saint Patrick's Day, which was another one that had huge beer sales, and no one had thought of selling alcohol on Halloween before that. It was genius on the part of the Core's marketing people.
Anywhere there is an interest in American youth culture, we've been able to export Halloween goods to them so that they can celebrate it. It started slowly quite a while ago, with things like Guinness, who would market Halloween parties to bars that served Guinness, and they'd send out the decorations with the extra guinness and you know, here's all. It's kind of like what happened with Single DeMaio here. More recently, it was like here's the Guinness, here's the stuff you put up in the bar Let's celebrate Halloween. Wherever we sell Guinness, it's you know, claiming the Irish holiday.
The other thing that has spread it around the world is retailing in things like McDonald's putting out these Halloween themed meals all over the world, and our sitcoms come back into play again. Everybody loves something like The Simpsons. The Simpsons is the most successful syndicated show in history, and of course The Simpsons does the Treehouse of Horror every year. Those things were seen all over the world and people started to get interested and they would pick up from there and begin to celebrate Halloween. That kind of brings us up to where we are at now, a global celebration that really started as a strictly American holiday that was descended from ancient Celtic tribes.
And great job is always on the production by Greg Hengler and especial thanks to Leslie Bennettyne and Lisa Morton again their books Trick or Treat, A History of Halloween and Halloween and American Holiday and American History, both available on Amazon dot Com or The Usual Suspects. By the way, ten billion dollars will be spent this year and every year on Halloween here in America alone, and what a story about this holiday? Not a big deal in colonial America. Let's face it, the Puritans weren't exactly partiers, and they didn't even celebrate Christmas, let alone Halloween. But after the Civil War, our greatest calamity, well, searching for the dead became well something of great interest, plus that Victorian sensibility. And then, of course, right after World War Two, we had TV, the suburbs, candy company, mass marketing, and well, just another reason to have some fun. And Americans love to make an excuse to have some fun. The story of Halloween here on our American Stories
