Every October the same things come out of the basement: the plastic skeleton, the orange lights, the bag of fun-size candy you buy too early and have to buy again. On the last night of the month, millions of kids put on costumes and walk the block in the dark, ringing doorbells, half scared and half delighted. It feels ancient. Some of it is. A surprising amount of it is younger than your great-grandparents.
The short answer: Halloween began as the eve of All Saints’ Day —All Hallows’ Eve— in Ireland, Scotland and England, with one foot in Samhain, the Irish festival that marked the end of summer, though historians still argue about how much it contributed. In the nineteenth century it crossed the Atlantic with Irish and Scottish immigrants, and in the United States and Canada it became the holiday we know. Everything in between —the Celts, the turnips, Stingy Jack— is a tangle of history and legend worth pulling apart.
What does the word “Halloween” mean?
“The eve of All Saints.” In Old English, hallow meant “saint” or “holy person,” and All Hallows was All Saints’ Day, November 1. The night before was All Hallows’ Even, and over the centuries the name squeezed down to Hallowe’en —the spelling many Canadians still use— and then to Halloween.
The name already tells half the story: Halloween is, first of all, the night before a Christian feast day.
Who put All Saints’ Day on November 1?
The popes in Rome, one step at a time. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1907, which summarizes the history of the feast:
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 609 or 610 | Pope Boniface IV dedicates the Pantheon in Rome to the Virgin Mary and all the martyrs, on May 13 |
| 731–741 | Pope Gregory III consecrates a chapel in St. Peter’s to all the saints and sets their feast on November 1 |
| 827–844 | Pope Gregory IV extends that feast to the whole Church |
| Around the year 1000 | Saint Odilo, abbot of Cluny in France, orders an annual remembrance of all the dead the day after: November 2, All Souls’ Day |
That is how the two days ended up side by side: November 1 for the saints, November 2 for all the dead. Centuries later, that same pair of dates traveled to Mexico and gave shape to the Day of the Dead. That story is in why Day of the Dead falls on November 1 and 2.
What was Samhain?
An Irish festival on November 1. Its name is usually translated as “summer’s end,” and it marked the turn into the dark half of the year. Most of what we know about it comes from medieval Irish texts, written down by Christian monks several centuries after the times they describe. In those stories, Samhain was when people gathered and feasted, and a night when supernatural things could happen.
That much you can read in the sources. The rest is where the debate starts.
What you’ll read on a lot of websites: that Samhain was the Celtic New Year and the great festival of the dead, that it has been celebrated for more than three thousand years, and that Halloween is its direct descendant.
What the people who study it say: Ronald Hutton, a historian at the University of Bristol, published an article in 2024 about exactly those two ideas. He explains that by the early twenty-first century they had become an “established orthodoxy” in books about the Celts, and that they trace back mainly to two Victorian scholars, John Rhys and James Frazer. His work goes back over the evidence they offered for it.
There’s one more detail that matters. It’s often said that the Church moved All Saints’ Day to November 1 to paper over Samhain. Historians who have looked at the calendar, like Hutton and Nicholas Rogers, point out that November 1 caught on first in England and Germany, around the year 800, while Ireland kept celebrating its saints in the spring. If the plan was to replace an Irish festival, it started in the wrong place.
Where that leaves us: Samhain existed, and it fell on the same date. How much it gave to Halloween is what’s argued over. Most of the specific customs —praying for souls, going door to door— come, according to Rogers, from the Christian cycle of All Saints and All Souls.
Where does trick-or-treating come from?
From several customs in Britain and Ireland, and from a twentieth-century North American invention.
- Souling: in England, around All Saints and All Souls, children and poor people went from house to house asking for food in exchange for praying for the souls of the family’s dead.
- Guising: in Scotland and Ireland, groups of young people in disguise went around the houses on Halloween night, singing or performing in exchange for something.
Those rounds and trick-or-treating are clearly related, although scholars haven’t been able to show a direct line from one to the other. What is documented is how the phrase itself appeared. The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, from the University of British Columbia, records it first in Ontario: in 1917 a newspaper in Sault Ste. Marie heard gangs of kids calling out “tricks or treats,” and one in Owen Sound heard “treat or trick.” The exact words “trick or treat” show up in 1927, in a report from Blackie, Alberta, about children at the back door and the front “demanding edible plunder.” So the phrase is, as far as anyone can tell, Canadian.
The custom spread across the United States and Canada in the 1920s and 1930s, paused with sugar rationing during the Second World War, and came back after it as the holiday of an entire continent.
What gets repeated: that trick-or-treating “comes from the Celts.” No document supports it.
Did the Celts carve turnips?
This is the internet’s favorite Halloween story, and it has two sides.
For a long time it was said that the Celts carved faces into turnips to scare off spirits at Samhain. Books said so, and so did a 1982 Library of Congress pamphlet. Historians who went looking for the evidence, like Ronald Hutton, don’t find turnip lanterns before the modern era: the custom is documented in Ireland, Scotland and England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The carved turnip is real, and it’s lovely. It’s just much younger than the story says. How it went from turnip to pumpkin, and who is supposed to be carrying that light, is the subject of the legend of the jack-o’-lantern. And the pumpkin itself, as it happens, is from Mexico: that’s in this other article.
How did it become the holiday we know?
By crossing the ocean. In the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of Irish and Scottish families emigrated to the United States and Canada and brought their autumn customs with them. There, in a little over a hundred years, Halloween picked up new layers: the pumpkin instead of the turnip, postcards with witches and black cats, the harvest-season scarecrows, costume parties and, last of all, trick-or-treating.
That transformation, layer by layer, has its own article.
And in Mexico?
The traffic went both ways. The anthropologist Stanley Brandes, who studied the Day of the Dead for decades, documented that in the northern states of Chihuahua, Coahuila and Sonora Halloween was present long before it reached the rest of Mexico. A friend of his from Coahuila told him that in his childhood, in the 1940s and 1950s, his family celebrated only Halloween, and that the skulls of Mexico City frightened him.
By the 1990s, pumpkins and costumes were everywhere in Mexico, and so was the backlash. Brandes describes a mural in Tepoztlán, Morelos, with a sign reading “No to Halloween. Keep your traditions,” and altar contests that disqualified anything “foreign to our tradition.”
Today many Mexican families celebrate both: Halloween on the 31st and the Day of the Dead on the 1st and 2nd. Meanwhile, the Day of the Dead has traveled north and has its own place in schools and neighborhoods across the United States and Canada. How the two holidays are alike and how they differ is in Halloween vs. Day of the Dead.
What’s told and what’s known
| The story goes that… | What’s documented | Who says so |
|---|---|---|
| Halloween is a Celtic festival more than three thousand years old | Its name and date come from the Christian eve of All Saints. Samhain existed on the same date; how much it contributed is debated | Rogers 2002; Hutton 2024 |
| Samhain was the Celtic New Year and the festival of the dead | It became an “established orthodoxy” tracing back mainly to Rhys and Frazer, Victorian scholars. Hutton re-examines their evidence | Hutton 2024 |
| The Church put All Saints on November 1 to cover up Samhain | The date caught on first in England and Germany; Ireland celebrated its saints in the spring | Hutton 1996; Rogers 2002 |
| The Celts carved turnips | Turnip lanterns are documented in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries | Hutton 1996 |
| The legend of Jack is from ancient Ireland | The oldest version anyone has been able to read is from 1894, and it has no turnip and no Halloween yet | Patterson 1894 |
| Trick-or-treating comes from the Celts | It has relatives in British and Irish souling and guising; the phrase appears in Ontario in 1917 and in its exact form in Alberta in 1927 | Hutton 1996; Rogers 2002; Tuleja 1994; DCHP-3 |
Questions
Is Halloween a religious holiday? It began as the eve of a religious feast, All Saints’ Day. Today, for most people who celebrate it, it’s a night of costumes and candy.
Are Halloween and the Day of the Dead the same thing? They’re two different holidays that share dates, because both lean on the calendar of All Saints and All Souls. How they’re alike and how they differ is in their own article.
Why is Halloween on October 31? Because it’s the eve of November 1, All Saints’ Day.
Is “trick or treat” American? The custom grew up in the United States and Canada together, but the earliest printed records of the phrase are Canadian: Ontario in 1917, and Alberta in 1927 for the exact words.
Sources
- Nicholas Rogers, Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night, Oxford University Press, 2002. doi:10.1093/oso/9780195146912.001.0001
- Ronald Hutton, “The Celtic New Year and Feast of the Dead,” Folklore 135, no. 1, 2024, pp. 69–86. doi:10.1080/0015587X.2023.2282282 (open access).
- Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, Oxford University Press, 1996.
- Francis Mershman, “All Saints’ Day” and “All Souls’ Day,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 1, 1907. All Saints · All Souls.
- Tad Tuleja, “Trick or Treat: Pre-Texts and Contexts,” in Jack Santino (ed.), Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life, University of Tennessee Press, 1994, pp. 82–102.
- W. H. Patterson, “Irish Fairies,” Proceedings of the Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club, 1894, p. 582. Internet Archive.
- “Trick or treat,” DCHP-3: Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, University of British Columbia. Entry.
- Stanley Brandes, “El Día de Muertos, el Halloween y la búsqueda de una identidad nacional mexicana,” Alteridades 10, no. 20, 2000, pp. 7–20. Open access on Redalyc. Coahuila and Tepoztlán, p. 16.
Written by the Idunn Editorial Team, with support from AI tools in the research and drafting.
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