Category: Holidays and traditions

When Halloween night fills up with glowing pumpkins, each with its crooked grin and a candle inside, few people know that light belongs to someone. His name is Jack. They say he was such a cheat that he fooled the devil himself, and that’s why he’s been wandering the roads ever since, with no home and no rest, lighting his way with a single ember.

That’s the legend of the jack-o’-lantern, and it comes from folktales of Ireland and Britain. The oldest version we were able to read was published in 1894, and it didn’t have a turnip, a pumpkin or Halloween yet. Those pieces were added later, and the pumpkin, oddly enough, is from Mexico. First comes the story, to read aloud. Then, the history behind it.

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What is the legend of Stingy Jack?

To read aloud (ages 6 to 10 · about four minutes)

Long ago, in a village in Ireland, there lived a man everyone called Stingy Jack. He never lent anyone anything, he never bought anyone a drink, and his tongue was so quick he could talk his way out of any trouble with a brand-new lie.

One night, at the village tavern, a very elegant gentleman sat down next to him, with eyes red as coals. It was the devil, and he had come for Jack.

“Before we go,” said Jack, not a bit afraid, “buy me one last drink.”

The devil thought that was funny. But when it was time to pay, neither of them had any money.

“You can do anything,” said Jack. “Turn yourself into a coin. We’ll pay, and then you can turn back.”

The devil, who was proud, turned himself into a silver coin. And Jack, quick as a wink, put it in his pocket, right next to a little cross he always carried. Trapped beside the cross, the devil couldn’t change back.

“Let me out!” he shouted from the pocket.

“I’ll let you out,” said Jack, “if you promise not to come for me for ten years.”

The devil promised. Ten years later, he came back.

“All right, I’ll go with you,” said Jack. “But first, fetch me an apple from that tree. I’m hungry.”

The devil climbed up. And while he was up there, Jack carved a cross into the trunk. The devil couldn’t get down.

“I’ll let you down if you promise never to take me.”

The devil promised again.

The years went by and Jack died, the way everybody does. He came to the gates of heaven, and they told him a cheat like him couldn’t come in. He came to the gates of hell, and the devil, who kept his promises, wouldn’t let him in either.

“So where do I go now?” asked Jack. “It’s very dark.”

The devil, laughing, tossed him an ember from the fires of hell. Jack hollowed out a turnip he had in his pocket, put the ember inside, and walked off with his lantern.

And they say he’s still out there. That’s why, on dark autumn nights, people in Ireland carved faces into turnips and set a light inside: to light the road, and so that Jack, seeing them, would keep on walking.

This is the version most often told today. It has many variants: in some Jack is a blacksmith, in others a farmer; sometimes the devil climbs a tree and sometimes he’s trapped in a sack. The ending is almost always the same: no heaven, no hell, and a light for the road.

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What does “jack-o’-lantern” mean?

“Jack of the lantern.” In English, Jack worked like “John Doe” or “Joe”: a name for any man at all. A Jack-o’-lantern was just some fellow walking around with a lantern.

The word is much older than Halloween pumpkins. Etymological dictionaries record it in English from the mid-seventeenth century, and not for a pumpkin: it was one of the names for the will-o’-the-wisp, those small lights sometimes seen at night over marshes, which drift away when someone follows them. Today they’re usually explained as marsh gases catching fire, although the explanation is still debated.

That’s Jack’s real beginning: a strange light in the night that needed a name and a story.

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How old is the legend?

Here it helps to separate what’s said from what can actually be read.

What’s said: almost every page that tells the legend calls it “ancient,” “Celtic” or “thousands of years old.” Where that Celtic idea comes from is in where Halloween came from.

What can be read: the oldest version we found is in a report of the Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club, in Northern Ireland, from 1894. It says that the will-o’-the-wisp, “or Jack o’ Lantern as he is called in some places,” is, by one account,

“the spirit of a man who was very wicked on earth, and also managed to trick and outwit the devil; and, in fact, made himself so feared by the prince of darkness, that after death he could not enter heaven, nor was even allowed into the other place, so afraid of him were the authorities there, and he must, therefore, wander about with his torch over dreary bogs and wastes for ever.”
— W. H. Patterson, “Irish Fairies,” 1894, p. 582

Almost everything is there: the trickster, the devil outwitted, both doors shut, the wandering light. What’s still missing is the turnip, the ember and Halloween. In 1894 Jack carried a torch over the bogs, on any night of the year.

Similar stories —a blacksmith or a soldier who tricks the devil and ends up with no place in the next world— are told in many countries in Europe, and folklorists group them as a single tale type. So the plot travels far beyond Ireland; the Irish touch is to have joined it to the light over the bog.

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Why did Jack carry a turnip?

Because in rural Ireland and Scotland, what people had was turnips, potatoes and beets, and that’s what country people carved lanterns from on autumn nights. That custom is well documented in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

On when it started, there are two views:

What’s said	Who says it
The Celts carved turnips at Samhain, more than two thousand years ago	Many websites, and even a 1982 Library of Congress pamphlet
There’s no trace of turnip lanterns before the modern era	Historians who went through the evidence, like Ronald Hutton of the University of Bristol

People who study the subject lean toward the second: the carved turnip is a folk custom a couple of centuries old, lovely and very real, with no evidence linking it to the Celts.

Then came the crossing. In the nineteenth century, Irish and Scottish families by the hundreds of thousands emigrated to the United States and Canada, and there they found something much better to carve: the pumpkin, big, hollow and easy to cut. The historian Cindy Ott, in her history of the pumpkin as an American icon, gives the jack-o’-lantern a whole chapter.

And here’s the part almost nobody tells: the Halloween pumpkin is from Mexico. The oldest domesticated seeds of its species were found in a cave in Oaxaca, Guilá Naquitz, and they’re about 10,000 years old. Its full story, with the milpa and the giant pumpkins, is in pumpkins come from Mexico. So Jack’s lantern, which started out as an Irish turnip, ended up made from a Mexican plant.

By February 1852 the carved pumpkin was already in American literature. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “Feathertop”, a New England witch, Mother Rigby, builds a scarecrow and gives it a pumpkin for a head, in which she “cut two holes for the eyes and a slit for the mouth.” And before she starts, she lights her pipe with an ember brought by an invisible helper. Witch, scarecrow, carved pumpkin and ember, all on the first pages. How the rest of Halloween piled up around it is in how Halloween came to North America.

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What do Jack and the scarecrow have in common?

They look alike and come from different places. The scarecrow is a farm object, made to do a job; Jack is a character from legend and the lantern named after him. Both can have a pumpkin for a head, both have a bit of the trickster, and stories have put them together more than once: Hawthorne’s “Feathertop” in 1852, and L. Frank Baum’s Jack Pumpkinhead in 1904.

The other character’s full story is in why there are scarecrows at Halloween.

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Are there legends like this in Mexico?

Lights that appear at night in the countryside have stories everywhere, and Mexico has its own. Some say they’re witches turned into balls of fire; others say they’re souls in torment, and in some villages people tell of a flame that rises from the ground to mark a spot where treasure is buried.

They’re different stories, with the same question underneath as Jack’s: what is that light, and who’s carrying it?

Does your family tell one? Ask your grandparents, wherever they grew up. Many of these stories live only in the voice of the person telling them, and they’re worth writing down before they’re lost.

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Questions to talk about after reading

For home or the classroom:

1. Why did both heaven and hell shut the door on Jack?
2. Do you think what happened to him was fair? What would you have done in his place?
3. Why do you think people carved faces into turnips?
4. If Jack lived where you live, what fruit or vegetable would he make his lantern from?
5. Make up a different ending: how could Jack finally find a place to stay?

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Sources

• W. H. Patterson, “Irish Fairies,” Annual Report and Proceedings of the Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club, series II, vol. III, 1894, pp. 573–582. Full text on Internet Archive. The quotation is on p. 582.
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Feathertop: A Moralized Legend,” 1852; collected in Mosses from an Old Manse. Text on Project Gutenberg.
• Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, Oxford University Press, 1996.
• Cindy Ott, Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon, University of Washington Press, 2012, ch. 5, “Jack-o’-Lantern Smiles.”
• Bruce D. Smith, “The Initial Domestication of Cucurbita pepo in the Americas 10,000 Years Ago,” Science 276 (1997): 932–934. doi:10.1126/science.276.5314.932
• Library of Congress, American Folklife Center, Halloween, pamphlet by Jack Santino, 1982: cited as an example of the Celtic version that later research revised.

Written by the Idunn Editorial Team, with support from AI tools in the research and drafting.

In October, orange pumpkins fill porches across the United States and Canada, farm stands, grocery-store bins and, more and more, Halloween parties in Mexico. They seem so thoroughly North American, so straight out of a movie, that it’s hard to picture their story starting in a cave in Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, some ten thousand years ago, when someone saved the seeds of a wild squash to plant again.

The Halloween pumpkin belongs to the species Cucurbita pepo, and the oldest known domesticated seeds of it come from Guilá Naquitz cave, in Oaxaca, between 8,000 and 10,000 years old. It’s one of the oldest cultivated plants in the Americas, a companion of corn and beans in the milpa. From there it traveled to Europe in the sixteenth century, and today it’s grown above all in India and China.

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Is the pumpkin really Mexican?

The Halloween pumpkin, yes. But “pumpkin” and “squash” are names for many plants, and the full story is more interesting.

Every squash and pumpkin of the genus Cucurbita is from the Americas. What they don’t have is a single birthplace: genetic studies count at least six separate domestications, in different parts of the continent. Peoples who never knew each other did the same thing, each on their own: pick the least bitter squashes, save their seeds and plant them again, generation after generation.

Species	Where it was domesticated	We know it as
Cucurbita pepo	Southern Mexico (Oaxaca); and again, separately, in what is now the eastern United States	The Halloween pumpkin, zucchini, acorn squash, summer squash
Cucurbita argyrosperma	Southwestern Mexico, the same region as corn	The cushaw, and the squash whose seeds go into Mexican pipián
Cucurbita maxima	South America, from a wild squash of Argentina and Bolivia	Hubbard and buttercup squash, and the giant pumpkins
Cucurbita moschata	Debated: probably northern South America, though some propose Mesoamerica	Butternut squash, and most canned pumpkin
Cucurbita ficifolia	From the Americas; its exact origin is still unresolved	Figleaf gourd, chilacayote in Mexico

So the complete answer is this: the Halloween pumpkin is Mexican; the giant ones at the fair are South American; and all of them are from the Americas. And one branch of Cucurbita pepo was domesticated independently right here, in the eastern United States, long before Europeans arrived.

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Pumpkin or squash: what’s the difference?

Botanically, there isn’t a clean one. “Pumpkin” is what English speakers call the round, orange, thick-skinned kinds, and “squash” covers most of the rest, but the same species can wear either name: a zucchini and a jack-o’-lantern pumpkin are both Cucurbita pepo.

The words themselves come from two very different places:

Word	Where it comes from
Pumpkin	From English pompion, by way of French pompon and Latin pepo, from Greek pépōn: “melon,” “ripened by the sun.” It’s the same root as the scientific name Cucurbita pepo
Squash	From the Narragansett (Algonquian) word askutasquash, recorded in English in the 1640s. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it literally means “the things that may be eaten raw”
Calabaza	Spanish, and much older than the voyage of Columbus: in the tenth century it named an Old World bottle gourd. When the Spanish met the American squashes, they used the name they already had
Ayote	From the Nahuatl ayotli, “squash.” Used in Mexico and Central America
Zapallo	From the Quechua sapallu. The general word across South America

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What does the milpa have to do with it?

Everything. The Mexican pumpkin grew up in the milpa and with the milpa.

The milpa is the traditional way of planting in Mexico and Central America: corn, beans and squash grow together in the same plot, along with chiles, tomatoes and wild greens. The word comes from the Nahuatl milpan: milli, “planted field,” and pan, “on top of.” North of the border, the same partnership is known through Indigenous agriculture as the Three Sisters.

Each plant helps the others:

• Corn grows tall and serves as a pole for the beans.
• Beans climb the corn and return nutrients to the soil.
• Squash spreads across the ground with its big leaves, which shade the soil, hold in moisture and keep weeds down.

The three complement each other on the plate too: tortillas, beans and squash, a complete meal that’s been eaten in Mexico for thousands of years.

Which came to the milpa first? The Oaxaca squash seeds are between 8,000 and 10,000 years old; the oldest known corn, found in the state of Guerrero, about 8,700. For a while it was said that squash was domesticated thousands of years before corn. With today’s dates the gap is much shorter, and at the Guerrero site they appear together. What’s certain is that squash was among the first plants ever sown in the Americas.

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How did it spread around the world?

By ship, in the exchange that followed 1492. And you can follow its trail through paintings.

• 1503–1508. The French painter Jean Bourdichon draws a squash in a prayer book for Queen Anne of Brittany. It’s a wild-looking form of Cucurbita pepo: the oldest known European image of an American squash.
• 1515–1518. In Rome, Giovanni da Udine paints garlands of fruits and vegetables on the ceilings of the Villa Farnesina. Among them are American squashes of several species, including the first known image of Cucurbita maxima, the South American one.
• 1542. The German botanist Leonhart Fuchs includes two American squashes in his great book of plants.

Within a few decades squash was being grown in Europe, and from there it spread to Africa and Asia. Today, according to the FAO, the countries that grow the most pumpkins and squash are India and China, followed by Egypt, Russia and Ukraine. Mexico ranked eleventh in 2024. The plant that came out of a cave in Oaxaca went around the world and is now harvested mostly on the other side of the planet.

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How did it end up at Halloween?

By a swap of vegetables, in a holiday that came from Britain and Ireland. In Ireland and Scotland people carved lanterns from turnips on autumn nights; when those families emigrated to North America in the nineteenth century, they found the pumpkin, big and easy to hollow out, and the turnip was left behind.

By February 1852 the carved pumpkin already appears in a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Feathertop,” in which a witch cuts eyes and a mouth into a pumpkin to make a scarecrow’s head. The story of that lantern, and of the man who’s said to carry it, is in the legend of the jack-o’-lantern. And the one about the figure with a pumpkin head is in why there are scarecrows at Halloween.

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How do giant pumpkins get so big?

With a different species and years of patience. Contest pumpkins are Cucurbita maxima, the South American species, and nearly all of them descend from one variety, ‘Atlantic Giant’, credited to Howard Dill, a farmer in Nova Scotia, Canada, in the late 1970s. They grow so large because their stems move far more food into the fruit than an ordinary pumpkin’s do.

The heaviest pumpkin in the world, according to Guinness World Records, weighed 2,819 pounds (1,278.8 kg). It was grown by twins Ian and Stuart Paton in England and weighed on October 6, 2025. They named it “Muggle.” That’s roughly the weight of a small car, and it measured about 21 feet (6.5 m) around: it would take about five kids holding hands to circle it.

The previous record belonged to Travis Gienger, of Minnesota: 2,749 pounds (1,246.9 kg), in 2023.

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What do people cook with pumpkin?

In the United States and Canada, pumpkin pie. The first cookbook written by an American, American Cookery, by Amelia Simmons (1796), already has two recipes for “pompkin” baked in a crust with eggs, spices and ginger. The pie became tied to Thanksgiving dinner thanks to the writer Sarah Josepha Hale, who in her novel Northwood (1827) gave it “the most distinguished niche” on the table and who later persuaded Abraham Lincoln to make Thanksgiving a national holiday, in 1863. In Canada it lands on the table earlier, for Thanksgiving on the second Monday of October.

You’ll sometimes hear that pumpkin pie was served at the first Thanksgiving, in 1621. No document shows it, and the story is told far more often than it can be proven.

In Mexico, almost everything. And each part of the plant has its recipe:

• **Calabaza en tacha**, candied pumpkin: pumpkin simmered in piloncillo (unrefined cane sugar) with cinnamon, which goes on the Day of the Dead altar. The holiday behind that altar is in why the Day of the Dead falls on November 1 and 2.
• Pipián: a mole made with pumpkin seeds.
• Squash blossoms: in quesadillas, soups, or stuffed. The smallest flowers are the most prized.
• Calabacitas: young squash stewed with corn, tomato and cheese, the whole milpa on one plate.
• Pepitas: pumpkin seeds toasted on a griddle, with salt and lime.

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Something to do at home

Plant pumpkin seeds. Save a few raw seeds from the pumpkin you carve, let them dry for two days and plant three in a cup of soil, about three-quarters of an inch (2 cm) deep. Water lightly and put them somewhere sunny. In one or two weeks, two little round leaves appear. It’s a small-scale version of what someone did in Oaxaca ten thousand years ago.

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Questions

Is a pumpkin a fruit or a vegetable? To a botanist it’s a fruit, because it holds the seeds. In the kitchen it’s used as a vegetable. Both answers are right, each in its own territory.

Are all Halloween pumpkins orange? The most common ones are, because they were bred that way. At farm stands you’ll find green, white, striped and speckled pumpkins, and all of them can be carved.

Can you eat a carving pumpkin? You can, although carving varieties have watery, less sweet flesh. For cooking, smaller “pie” or “sugar” pumpkins do much better.

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Sources

• Bruce D. Smith, “The Initial Domestication of Cucurbita pepo in the Americas 10,000 Years Ago,” Science 276, 1997, pp. 932–934. doi:10.1126/science.276.5314.932
• Olga I. Sanjur, Dolores R. Piperno et al., “Phylogenetic relationships among domesticated and wild species of Cucurbita (Cucurbitaceae) inferred from a mitochondrial gene: Implications for crop plant evolution and areas of origin,” PNAS 99, 2002, pp. 535–540. doi:10.1073/pnas.012577299
• Dolores R. Piperno et al., “Starch grain and phytolith evidence for early ninth millennium B.P. maize from the Central Balsas River Valley, Mexico,” PNAS 106, 2009, pp. 5019–5024. doi:10.1073/pnas.0812525106
• CONABIO, “Milpa” (in Spanish).
• Gran Diccionario Náhuatl, UNAM: ayotli.
• ASALE, Diccionario de americanismos: “zapallo” and “ayote”.
• Joan Corominas and José A. Pascual, Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, s.v. “calabaza.”
• Online Etymology Dictionary, “pumpkin” and “squash”.
• Harry S. Paris et al., “First known image of Cucurbita in Europe, 1503–1508,” Annals of Botany 98, 2006, pp. 41–47. doi:10.1093/aob/mcl082
• Jules Janick and Harry S. Paris, “The cucurbit images (1515–1518) of the Villa Farnesina, Rome,” Annals of Botany 97, 2006, pp. 165–176. doi:10.1093/aob/mcj025
• FAO, FAOSTAT, production of “Pumpkins, squash and gourds,” 2024.
• R. W. Robinson, Squash and Pumpkin, report of the Cucurbit Crop Germplasm Committee, USDA-ARS, 1995.
• Jessica A. Savage et al., “The making of giant pumpkins,” Plant, Cell & Environment 38, 2015, pp. 1543–1554. doi:10.1111/pce.12502
• Guinness World Records, “Heaviest pumpkin”, accessed September 25, 2026.
• Larousse Cocina, Diccionario enciclopédico de la gastronomía mexicana: “Calabaza en dulce o en tacha” (in Spanish).
• Amelia Simmons, American Cookery, Hartford, 1796. Text on Project Gutenberg.
• Plimoth Patuxet Museums, “Sarah Josepha Hale”.

Written by the Idunn Editorial Team, with support from AI tools in the research and drafting.

Every November, Death goes out for a stroll across Mexico. She shows up in the newspapers, in classrooms, in the family group chat. She’s looking for the teacher, the neighbor, the politician everyone’s talking about, the cousin who’s always late, and she dedicates a few verses to each one before carrying them off. Nobody’s scared: everybody laughs. These are calaveras literarias, “literary skulls,” often called by the affectionate diminutive calaveritas.

A calavera literaria is a short, teasing poem, usually in four-line stanzas of eight syllables, in which Death comes for someone who’s alive and pokes fun at their habits. They’re written for the Day of the Dead. As a genre, its origin is usually placed in the newspapers and popular print shops of nineteenth-century Mexico. Below: its history, examples in Spanish and English, and how to write one in four steps.

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What is a calavera literaria?

A poem with three rules of play:

1. Death comes for someone. La Calaca, la Flaca (“Skinny”), la Pelona (“Baldy”): she has many names. She comes to take a real person who’s still alive.
2. She teases that person. About what they love, what they always do, what everyone knows about them. That’s the joke: in the face of death we’re all equal, so everyone gets laughed at a little.
3. It rhymes. Usually in quatrains (four-line stanzas) with eight syllables per line.

The historian Grecia Monroy Sánchez, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), sums it up: calaveras can be written by “anyone who wants to make fun of their friends, relatives or some public figure of the moment,” and today they’re kept alive largely by schools, contests and the press.

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When did the first one appear?

It depends on whom you ask, and it’s worth telling carefully.

What gets repeated on many websites: that the first calavera was published in the newspaper El Socialista, in Guadalajara, in 1849. Other pages say 1879. None shows the issue, and it doesn’t appear in the academic sources we reviewed. It may be true; for now it’s a claim copied from page to page without anyone producing the newspaper.

What’s documented:

When	What	Who documents it
Eighteenth century	Joaquín de Bolaños publishes La portentosa vida de la Muerte (“The Portentous Life of Death”), a book in which Death is a character. Traits of the calaveras already appear	Monroy Sánchez, citing Gutiérrez and López Casillas
1835 and 1836	Two prints with engravings of skeletons acting like people, around All Saints’ Day. The historian Montserrat Galí sees them as forerunners; Monroy Sánchez notes they’re in prose and not yet calaveras as such	Galí 2013; Monroy Sánchez 2025
1847	An illustrated newspaper called El Calavera (“The Skull”) comes out in Mexico City	Stanley Brandes, anthropologist at the University of California
From the 1870s	Writing calaveras against politicians is already common practice in the satirical press	Rafael Barajas Durán, cited by Monroy Sánchez
1880–1917	Antonio Vanegas Arroyo’s print shop in Mexico City publishes calaveras on cheap single sheets, with engravings. This is where the genre settles	Monroy Sánchez, as a working hypothesis
Today	Written in schools, in contests and in newspapers	Monroy Sánchez

So the honest answer is that calaveras took shape over the nineteenth century, among mocking newspapers, broadsheets and the theater of the day: performances of Don Juan Tenorio, with its cemetery scenes, may also have played a part. And their roots go much further back: to the medieval danse macabre, where Death dances with kings and peasants alike.

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What did José Guadalupe Posada have to do with it?

A lot, even though he didn’t write the verses.

Posada was an engraver. He worked for Vanegas Arroyo’s print shop making the images: skeletons dancing, riding bicycles, dressed to the nines. The calavera sheets carried one large engraving with the verses around it. Some engravings were made for the occasion and others were reused from earlier sheets.

And the verses? Other people at the print shop wrote them, and they almost never signed them. Monroy Sánchez examined sixteen of those sheets: most give the year, and none says who wrote them. They ran from 15 to 50 stanzas, in quatrains, and the lines were always eight syllables.

Posada’s most famous skull, the one we now call La Catrina, appeared on one of those sheets in 1913. That story, with her name and her trip around the world, has its own article.

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Calavera examples for kids, in Spanish

Three written by our team, to show how they work. All in eight-syllable quatrains, with a plain English gloss so you can follow the joke.

For the teacher

La Muerte llegó a la escuela
buscando a doña Inés,
pero ella puso tarea:
y ahora cuenta hasta diez.

Death came to the school / looking for Mrs. Inés, / but she assigned homework: / and now Death is counting to ten.

For the brother who’s always hungry

A mi hermano comelón
la Calaca fue a buscar;
comiendo un gran chicharrón,
y se quedó a merendar.

For my greedy little brother / Death came calling; / she found him eating a big pork rind, / and stayed for a snack.

For whoever writes it (fill in the blanks):

A ________, que siempre ________,
la Flaca vino a llevar,
pero ________ ________
y se tuvo que ________.

Skinny Death came to take ______, who always ______, / but ______ / and she had to ______.

Notice the trick in the first two: Death arrives in all her seriousness and ends up caught in the person’s habit. That twist is the joke.

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Can you write one in English?

Yes, and plenty of classrooms do. English doesn’t count syllables the way Spanish does, so aim for lines of about seven or eight syllables and rhyme the second line with the fourth. Keep the three rules: Death comes for someone real, the joke is about their habit, and it ends with a twist.

For the teacher, in English

Skinny Death came to our school
to take our teacher, Ms. Lee;
she gave Death a spelling test,
and Death’s still stuck on letter C.

For the brother, in English

Death came knocking for my brother,
who eats from dawn to night;
he offered her a taco,
and now they share each bite.

In a dual-language or Spanish class, a good challenge is to write the same calavera twice, once in each language, and compare which jokes survive the trip.

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How do you write a calavera step by step?

1. Pick who it’s for. Someone you know well: your grandpa, your teacher, your dog, yourself. A calavera is written with affection; the joke is for laughing together.

2. List their habits. What they love to eat, what they always say, what they do when they’re mad, what they play. That list is your rhyme mine.

3. Imagine the encounter. Death comes for that person and… something happens: she gets distracted, stays to play, has to wait in line, ends up doing the homework. The funny ending comes from your list in step 2.

4. Rhyme and count. Write four lines. In Spanish, the first rhymes with the third and the second with the fourth (or the first with the fourth and the second with the third). To count syllables, clap each one: la-Muer-te-lle-gó-a-la es-cue-la. Two Spanish tricks:

• When one word ends in a vowel and the next begins with one, they count as a single syllable: lle-gó a sounds like lle-góa.
• If a line ends in a word stressed on the last syllable, like Inés or diez, add one syllable to the count.

The first version is almost never perfect: read it aloud, change a word, and try again.

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How can you use them in the classroom?

A 50-minute session, from third grade up, or from Spanish II in a world-language class:

1. Read two calaveras aloud and guess who they’re teasing (10 min).
2. Clap out the syllables as a whole class, using the example lines (10 min).
3. Write in pairs, with the fill-in quatrain: each pair picks a character from a book the class has read, so nobody in the room is the target (20 min).
4. A calavera gallery on the wall or on the class ofrenda (10 min).

The book-character trick works well: it keeps all the fun and keeps anyone from feeling singled out. If your class is building an ofrenda, Halloween vs. Day of the Dead has ideas for keeping it about real memories. And to decorate the poems, sugar skulls are the natural companion.

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Questions

Isn’t it in bad taste to make fun of death? It’s a tradition more than a century old, and its point is the reverse: to remember, with humor, that death makes us all equal. What does matter is making sure the joke doesn’t hurt anyone.

Do they have to be eight syllables? It’s the most common form, and the one that sounds like a calavera. Some calaveras use other line lengths; to start, eight-syllable lines are the easiest to rhyme. In English, aim for the rhythm rather than the count.

Can you write them about people who have died? The tradition dedicates them to the living: the fun is that Death comes for someone who’s still here. The ofrenda is for remembering those who are gone.

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Sources

• Grecia Monroy Sánchez, “Muerte, política y sátira en la imprenta popular mexicana: las calaveras del porfiriato a la revolución,” Caracol (Universidade de São Paulo), no. 29, 2025, pp. 442–476. doi:10.11606/issn.2317-9651.i29p442-476 (open access, in Spanish). The references in this article are on pp. 448–452.
• Stanley Brandes, “Iconography in Mexico’s Day of the Dead: Origins and Meaning,” Ethnohistory 45, no. 2, 1998, pp. 181–218. Open access on eScholarship. El Calavera (1847), p. 202.
• Cited by Monroy Sánchez: Rafael Barajas Durán, Posada, mito y mitote (FCE, 2009); Montserrat Galí Boadella, “De romances, relaciones y otras hojas volantes…,” in Posada. 100 años de calavera (Fundación BBVA / RM, 2013); Herón Pérez Martínez, “La sátira popular mexicana. Las calaveras” (El Colegio de Michoacán, 2015).

Written by the Idunn Editorial Team, with support from AI tools in the research and drafting.

Every November, thousands of people in Mexico paint their faces as skulls, put on a feathered hat and go out into the street dressed as La Catrina. The elegant lady made of bones is on altars, in bakeries, in movies and in clay figures of every size, and in recent years on posters and in parades from Los Angeles to Toronto. She seems to have always been there. And yet she started out as something else: a lone skull in an outrageous hat, on a sheet of cheap paper a little over a hundred years ago.

La Catrina was born as a print by José Guadalupe Posada published in 1913 under the name Calavera garbancera. It was just a skull in a hat, with no body, and it mocked people who flaunted an elegance they didn’t have. The name Catrina appears in 1930, in a book about Posada with an introduction by Diego Rivera. And in 1947 Diego Rivera gave her a body, a dress and a feather boa in a mural, and put her at the center of Mexico’s history.

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Who created La Catrina?

José Guadalupe Posada, an engraver from Aguascalientes, born in 1852. He worked for several publishers, above all for Antonio Vanegas Arroyo’s print shop in Mexico City, which sold cheap single sheets with news, songs, miracles and, every November, calaveras: teasing verses paired with engravings.

Posada supplied the image. Other people at the print shop wrote the verses, almost always unsigned.

The first recorded appearance of his skull in a hat is in 1913, on a sheet titled Remate de calaveras alegres y sandungueras, now held by the National Museum of Art (MUNAL) in Mexico City. By then Posada had already died, early that year, never knowing how far his drawing would travel. The print shop kept using the same plate for years, with other verses: in 1924 it came out again in El panteón de las pelonas.

When did he engrave it? Nobody knows exactly. Some propose 1910; the certain date is still its first publication, 1913.

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What does “garbancera” mean?

There are two readings, and both are worth knowing.

The most widespread: the skull mocked people who pretended to a social position they didn’t have. In the Mexico of Porfirio Díaz, anything European was seen as elegant, and some people were ashamed of their Indigenous roots and wore ostrich-plume hats to pass for another class. Posada drew her that way: in a huge, luxurious hat, even though she was nothing but bones. It’s the reading found, for example, in Esmeralda Álvarez Contreras’s study (2026).

Another reading: at the time, garbancera also meant a woman who sold chickpeas (garbanzos), and some researchers read the verses on that sheet as a jab aimed at them in particular.

Both agree on what matters: the Garbancera was born as satire, a joke about appearances. And the punchline is the same as in every calavera: however much you dress up, underneath we’re all the same.

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Did the original Catrina have a body?

No. This is the fact that surprises people most: Posada’s Calavera garbancera is only a head. A grinning skull under a wide-brimmed hat heaped with flowers and plumes. No dress, no arms, no boa. No painted face either: it was a black-and-white print, in a single ink.

Everything else came later, from other hands.

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Who named her “Catrina”?

The name appears in 1930, in a book collecting hundreds of Posada’s prints: the Monografía de 406 grabados de José Guadalupe Posada, edited by Frances Toor, Blas Vanegas Arroyo and Paul O’Higgins, with an introduction by Diego Rivera. On page 160, the print is titled “Calavera Catrina.”

In Mexico, catrín and catrina described people who were very well dressed, elegant and a bit of a show-off: a dandy, a fancy lady. The name fit perfectly, and from then on the Garbancera was La Catrina.

You’ll sometimes read that Posada named her. No document shows it: in Posada’s lifetime, the print wasn’t called that.

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What did Diego Rivera do with her?

He gave her a body and made her famous. In 1947 Rivera painted an enormous mural in the Hotel del Prado in Mexico City: Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central. Figures from the whole of Mexican history parade through it: the colonial period, Independence, the Reform, the Revolution.

And at the center, La Catrina. For the first time full-length, in a long dress and Posada’s hat, with a feather boa shaped like a plumed serpent, like the god Quetzalcóatl. On one arm is José Guadalupe Posada himself, very dapper, and holding her hand is a boy: Diego Rivera, painting himself as a child.

With that, Rivera paid two tributes at once: to the skull and to the man who engraved it. The mural can be seen today at the Museo Mural Diego Rivera, beside the Alameda park in Mexico City.

See the full mural on the Museo Mural Diego Rivera website (opens in a new tab). Rivera’s work is still under copyright, so we describe it here and you can see it whole there.

That’s where the myth that Diego Rivera created La Catrina comes from. What he did was give her a body, a dress and a place of honor. The skull was already Posada’s.

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What’s told and what’s known

The story goes that…	What’s known
Diego Rivera created La Catrina	José Guadalupe Posada engraved her. Rivera painted her full-length in 1947
Posada named her Catrina	Posada knew her as a calavera, without that name. “Calavera Catrina” appears in 1930
Posada wrote the Garbancera’s verses	Posada made the engravings; the verses were by other writers at the print shop, almost always anonymous
La Catrina was always a symbol of the Day of the Dead	She was born as a satire on appearances. She became a national symbol over the twentieth century
The original Catrina had a face painted with flowers and colors	The print was black and white. The colorful face came much later

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How did she become a symbol of Mexico?

Little by little, in four steps:

1. 1920s and 1930s. Artists like Jean Charlot and Diego Rivera, and the editor Frances Toor, rediscover Posada and present him as a great artist of the people. His skulls start to be seen as something deeply Mexican.
2. 1947. Rivera’s mural puts La Catrina at the center of Mexican history.
3. From the 1980s. In Capula, Michoacán, a potters’ village, the artist Juan Torres Calderón champions clay Catrinas, now sold all over the country. In 2014 a giant Catrina went up at the entrance to the village.
4. The movies. The Book of Life (2014), produced by Guillermo del Toro, and Pixar’s Coco (2017) take La Catrina and skull face paint around the world.

Some say Mexico City’s big Day of the Dead parade, first held in 2016, was inspired by the 2015 James Bond film Spectre, which opens with one that didn’t exist yet. The press and tourism officials have told it that way; we didn’t find a study documenting it, but it’s a good example of how traditions keep moving. How the skull traveled north and into Halloween is in how Halloween came to North America.

From a joke on a broadsheet to the symbol of a country: La Catrina took about a hundred years to make that trip.

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What does La Catrina mean today?

Many things at once. For some people she’s the whole Day of the Dead in one figure. For others, a reminder that death comes for everyone, feathered hat or not, which was Posada’s joke. And for many families she’s above all a joyful way of welcoming those who are gone.

For home or the classroom: draw your own Catrina. Start the way Posada did, with the skull and the hat, and then decide the rest yourself: what flowers does she wear? What color is her dress? What’s her name? And if you want to write her some verses, like the ones on Vanegas Arroyo’s sheets, here’s how to write a calavera literaria.

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Questions

Is La Catrina a man or a woman? A woman. Her partner, in many figures and costumes, is El Catrín.

Is La Catrina a Halloween costume? She belongs to the Day of the Dead. In recent years she shows up at Halloween parties too, especially outside Mexico, but she was born here, on the calavera sheets. If you dress as her, the respectful way is the one that knows her story: an elegant skull who reminds everyone that underneath we’re all equal. How the two holidays cross paths is in Halloween vs. Day of the Dead, and her sweet cousins are the sugar skulls.

Where can you see the original print? Original impressions are held at the National Museum of Art (MUNAL) in Mexico City, and Rivera’s mural is at the Museo Mural Diego Rivera, beside the Alameda.

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Sources

• Esmeralda Itzel Álvarez Contreras, “Traslado semántico en la imagen del grabado La calavera garbancera del litógrafo mexicano José Guadalupe Posada a principios del siglo XX,” Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Diseño y Comunicación (Universidad de Palermo), no. 305, 2026, pp. 149–163. doi:10.18682/cdc.vi305.13641 (open access, in Spanish).
• Grecia Monroy Sánchez, “Muerte, política y sátira en la imprenta popular mexicana: las calaveras del porfiriato a la revolución,” Caracol, no. 29, 2025, pp. 442–476. doi:10.11606/issn.2317-9651.i29p442-476 (open access, in Spanish).
• Stanley Brandes, “Iconography in Mexico’s Day of the Dead: Origins and Meaning,” Ethnohistory 45, no. 2, 1998, pp. 181–218. Open access on eScholarship.
• Ariadna Lorea Ruiz Gómez, “Esqueletos, catrinas y judas en el universo decorativo de Diego Rivera,” Res Mobilis 8, no. 9, 2019, pp. 175–196. doi:10.17811/rm.8.9.2019.175-196 (in Spanish).
• Frances Toor, Paul O’Higgins and Blas Vanegas Arroyo (eds.), Monografía: las obras de José Guadalupe Posada, grabador mexicano, Mexican Folkways, 1930 (reissued by Editorial RM, 2014).
• Museo Nacional de Arte, Remate de calaveras alegres y sandungueras, 1913.
• Museo Mural Diego Rivera, gallery sheet for the mural (in Spanish).

Written by the Idunn Editorial Team, with support from AI tools in the research and drafting.

On almost any street in the United States or Canada, on the night of October 31, there are lit pumpkins on the steps, scarecrows on the porches, cotton cobwebs in the windows, and knots of kids in costume going door to door with a pillowcase in hand. It all looks as old as the continent. And yet that night, the way we know it, is only a little over a hundred years old.

Halloween arrived in North America in the nineteenth century with Irish and Scottish families who crossed the Atlantic, and here it was rebuilt one layer at a time. The pumpkin replaced the turnip. Early twentieth-century postcards fixed the witches and black cats in place. Trick-or-treating took hold in the 1920s and 1930s, and the phrase itself was first printed in Canada. And only a few decades ago, a Mexican layer was added: the skull. This is how it was put together, piece by piece.

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What did Irish and Scottish families bring with them?

Games, pranks and a bit of magic. In Ireland, Scotland and Wales, Halloween night had been tied for centuries to fairies, mischief and, above all, fortune-telling about love.

The most famous witness is a poem. In 1785 the Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote “Halloween,” published the following year. It describes a night in the countryside when young people play games to find out whom they’ll marry. In one, you pulled a kale plant from the garden and looked at the stalk: if it came up straight, your future spouse would be tall and strong; if it came up crooked, less so. In another, you set nuts by the fire, each one named for someone, and watched how they behaved as they roasted. And the poem opens with fairies dancing on the hills that night.

Then came the crossing. Between 1845 and 1852, the Great Famine drove hundreds of thousands of people out of Ireland, most of them to the United States and many to British North America, today’s Canada. According to the folklorist Lisa Gabbert, they brought with them the pranks and mischief of that night and the rounds from house to house asking for something.

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Was there anything here before?

There was autumn, harvest and ghost stories. And one book that brings them all together.

Around 1820, Washington Irving published The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. In it, a schoolmaster named Ichabod Crane walks past fields where ears of corn peek out from their leafy coverts and, below, yellow pumpkins lie turning their bellies to the sun, “giving ample prospects of the most luxurious of pies.” He arrives at a farmhouse party with apple, peach and pumpkin pies, and by the end of the night the guests are telling ghost stories.

That same night, Ichabod meets the dreaded Headless Horseman. The next morning all anyone finds by the brook is his hat and, close beside it, a shattered pumpkin. The reader gets the joke: his rival had dressed up as the rider and thrown a pumpkin at him.

The story doesn’t take place on Halloween, but it already has nearly everything: corn, pumpkins, apples, pranks and ghosts. When the Irish holiday arrived, it found the stage already set.

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When did the pumpkin get a face?

In the mid-nineteenth century. In Ireland and Scotland people carved turnips; in North America pumpkins were bigger and easier to hollow out, and the turnip was left behind.

By February 1852 the carved pumpkin was already in literature: in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “Feathertop”, a witch cuts “two holes for the eyes and a slit for the mouth” in a pumpkin to make a scarecrow’s head.

The story of the lantern is in the legend of the jack-o’-lantern, the scarecrow has an article of its own, and the pumpkin, which comes from Mexico, is in where pumpkins come from.

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What did postcards have to do with it?

They gave Halloween its face. Between 1900 and 1920 the United States went through the “golden age” of the postcard, and Halloween had its own.

The historian Adrienne Darrah explains how it happened:

• In 1898 Congress allowed postcards printed by private companies to be mailed at the same cheap one-cent rate.
• By 1909 more than a billion postcards were being sold in the United States a year. Many of the prettiest were printed in Germany.
• That same year a tariff made German postcards more expensive, and around 1910 the craze began to fade.

In those twenty years, Halloween postcards filled up with witches, black cats, pumpkins, moons and love-divination games: apples, mirrors, couples peering into the future. The people who bought and mailed them most were women of the new middle class. And so what used to vary from one town to the next became a single picture shared by the whole country. If you’ve ever bought a “vintage Halloween” print, you’ve bought that picture.

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And the party games?

They came out of fortune-telling. Bobbing for apples floating in a tub of water, hanging apple peels to see who walks under them, setting nuts by the fire: all of them were love-divination games that came over from Britain and Ireland and turned into party games. In the early twentieth century, Halloween parties at home, with costumes and games, became fashionable.

More than a hundred years later, bobbing for apples is still one of the night’s favorite games.

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When did trick-or-treating start?

In the 1920s and 1930s, and it became the custom of the whole continent after the Second World War.

Before that, the night was known for pranks: gates taken off their hinges, wagons hoisted onto roofs, windows soaped. Trick-or-treating brought some order to that night. Instead of random mischief, kids in costume went from house to house, and anyone who handed over a treat was spared the trick.

The words appear first in Canada. The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, from the University of British Columbia, finds them in Ontario in 1917, as “tricks or treats” in Sault Ste. Marie and “treat or trick” in Owen Sound. The exact phrase turns up in 1927, in a report from Blackie, Alberta: kids at the back door and the front “demanding edible plunder by the word ‘trick or treat.’” From there it spread south and west until it was simply what Halloween sounded like.

Its distant relatives are the rounds of Britain and Ireland: souling, asking for food in exchange for praying for the souls of the dead, and guising, going from house to house in disguise. The step from those to trick-or-treating hasn’t been documented in a straight line; the family resemblance has.

In the 1970s another layer appeared: the fear of razor blades and poison in Halloween candy. The historian Nicholas Rogers devotes a whole chapter to it and studies it as a collective panic. It left behind a habit that’s still alive: checking the candy when you get home.

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And the Mexican skull?

It’s the most recent layer, and its dates are fairly clear. According to the researcher Regina Marchi:

When	What happened
Before the 1970s	In the United States, sugar skulls, pan de muerto and the altars of southern Mexico were practically unknown
Early 1970s	In Los Angeles and San Francisco, Chicano artists organize the first public Day of the Dead celebrations, with sugar-skull workshops and altar exhibitions. The skull becomes a symbol of Chicano identity
2000s	Day of the Dead imagery reaches mass media: TV series, films, magazines
2010s	Skulls and the Catrina show up in Halloween-store costumes, phone cases and beer cans, and the debate over cultural appropriation begins
2013	Disney tries to trademark “Día de los Muertos” and withdraws after public backlash
2017	Coco is released

So the skull has been in the United States for half a century, and mixed in with Halloween for about fifteen years. Sugar skulls and La Catrina have histories of their own, which began in Mexico long before. And how the two holidays sit side by side is in Halloween vs. Day of the Dead.

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The history of Halloween in North America, in one table

Layer	When	From where
Love divination, fairies and pranks	Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries	Scotland and Ireland (Burns, 1785)
Autumn, harvest and ghost stories	Around 1820	United States (Irving)
The great Irish migration	1845–1852	Ireland, to the United States and Canada
The pumpkin instead of the turnip	Mid-nineteenth century	North America, with a plant from Mexico
Witches, black cats and pumpkins on postcards	1900–1920	Printers in the United States and Germany
The scarecrow as an autumn figure	From 1900	Seasonal decorations in the United States
Costume parties and games	Early twentieth century	United States and Canada
Trick-or-treating	1920s–1930s; the whole continent after 1945	The phrase: Ontario 1917, Alberta 1927
The Mexican skull	Chicano since the 1970s; part of Halloween since the 2010s	Mexico, by way of the Chicano movement

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Questions

Is Halloween an American holiday? The way it’s celebrated today, yes: it was assembled in the United States and Canada between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its name and date are much older and come from the Christian eve of All Saints in Britain and Ireland. That’s the subject of where Halloween came from.

Is Halloween in Canada the same as in the United States? Almost layer for layer, since both countries received the same immigrants and the same customs. Canadians often keep the older spelling, Hallowe’en, and the earliest printed “trick or treat” is Canadian.

When did Halloween reach Mexico? In the north, many decades ago; in the rest of the country it became visible mainly in the 1990s. How it relates to the Day of the Dead is in this article.

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Sources

• Lisa Gabbert, “Divination Games and the Romantic Halloween Postcard,” Ritsumeikan Bungaku 683, 2023, pp. 291–306. Open-access PDF.
• Adrienne Darrah, “May fortune’s lantern burn serene: An analysis of golden age Halloween postcards as middle-class promotional culture,” Journal of American Culture 47, no. 3, 2024, pp. 218–230. doi:10.1111/jacc.13580 (open access).
• Washington Irving, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, 1819–1820. Text on Project Gutenberg.
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Feathertop: A Moralized Legend,” The International Magazine, February and March 1852. Text on Project Gutenberg.
• Nicholas Rogers, Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night, Oxford University Press, 2002.
• 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.
• “Trick or treat,” DCHP-3: Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, University of British Columbia. Entry.
• Regina Marchi, “U.S. Day of the Dead: Fusing Spanish, Indigenous and U.S. Cultures to Communicate New Messages,” Camino Real 3, no. 5, 2011, pp. 103–125. Open-access PDF, Instituto Franklin (UAH). Dates in the table, pp. 109–114.
• Colin Gunckel, “Charles and Ray Eames’s Day of the Dead (1957)…,” in Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film, Duke University Press, 2019, pp. 136–156. doi:10.1515/9781478090090-010 (open access).
• Orquidea Morales, “Horror and Death: Rethinking Coco‘s Border Politics,” Film Quarterly 73, no. 4, 2020, pp. 41–49. doi:10.1525/fq.2020.73.4.41

Written by the Idunn Editorial Team, with support from AI tools in the research and drafting.

In many Mexican homes, on the night of October 31, the kids go out dressed as witches and vampires to ask for candy, and the next morning the same family sets up the ofrenda, the home altar, with marigolds, pan de muerto and a photo of Grandma. Two holidays in three days, both with skulls, both with the dead. And north of the border, the same week, a classroom hangs paper bats on one wall and cut-paper banners on the other. So are they the same thing? Is one crowding out the other?

Halloween and the Day of the Dead are two different holidays that share their dates for the same reason: both rest on the Catholic calendar of All Saints’ Day (November 1) and All Souls’ Day (November 2). Halloween is the eve, and it grew up in Ireland, Scotland, the United States and Canada as a night of costumes, frights and candy. The Day of the Dead took shape in Mexico during the colonial period, blending that calendar with Indigenous practices, and it’s a celebration for welcoming back the family’s dead. They’re cousins: same grandmother, different roads.

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Is the Day of the Dead “Mexican Halloween”?

It’s the question almost everyone asks first, so it’s worth answering head-on: they’re related, and each one belongs to its own home. The Day of the Dead is a family holiday about specific people who died; Halloween is a community night of play and make-believe. They share a calendar and a few symbols, and the rest of this article is about where they meet and where they part.

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How are they alike?

In more ways than you might expect:

• The date. Both hang from the same calendar. Halloween is the eve of November 1; the Day of the Dead is November 1 and 2. The story of those dates starts with the popes of Rome and the monks of Cluny.
• Death as the theme. Both are about the dead and what lies beyond, and both often handle it with humor.
• Skulls. They show up in both, though they play different parts.
• Something given or shared. Candy for whoever knocks on Halloween; bread, food and sugar skulls on the Day of the Dead.
• Both were built in layers, over centuries, and both keep changing.

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How are they different?

	Halloween	Day of the Dead
When	October 31	November 1 and 2 (in many places, starting on the 31st)
Where it comes from	The eve of All Saints in Ireland, Scotland and England; transformed in the United States and Canada in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries	Took shape in Mexico in the colonial period, on the Catholic calendar, with the Indigenous practices of each region
What it celebrates	A night of fantasy, frights and play	The visit of the family’s dead
Who is remembered	No one in particular: the characters are witches, ghosts, monsters	Specific people: a grandmother, an uncle, a friend
Where it happens	Out on the street, door to door, and at parties	At home, around the ofrenda, and at the cemetery
What people do	Dress up, trick-or-treat, carve pumpkins	Build the ofrenda, visit and decorate graves, eat together, write calaveras
Its symbols	Jack-o’-lantern, witch, black cat, ghost, bat, scarecrow	Marigolds (cempasúchil), ofrenda, pan de muerto, papel picado, candles, La Catrina, literary calaveras
The role of death	Something that scares you, and that you play with	Someone who visits, and whom you welcome
Recognition	—	UNESCO inscribed it in 2008 as intangible cultural heritage: the Indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead

If you had to say it in one sentence to a child: on Halloween we play at being scared of the dead; on the Day of the Dead, we invite them to dinner.

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Whose skulls are they?

Both holidays’, with different stories.

On the Day of the Dead, skulls are playful and affectionate: sugar skulls with a name across the forehead, the teasing verses of literary calaveras, and the elegant Catrina, who was born in a print by José Guadalupe Posada in 1913.

On Halloween, for more than a century, skulls were skeletons meant to scare. The decorated Mexican skull, with its flowers, joined American Halloween very recently. According to the researcher Regina Marchi, before the 1970s it was practically unknown in the United States; it arrived with the Chicano movement, and in the 2010s it showed up in Halloween-store costumes. That’s part of how Halloween came to North America.

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How did the two meet in Mexico?

Through the north first, and then everywhere. The anthropologist Stanley Brandes documented that in Chihuahua, Coahuila and Sonora, the states along the U.S. border, Halloween had been around for a long time. A friend of his from Coahuila remembered 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 all over the country, and the backlash came. Brandes describes a mural in Tepoztlán, Morelos, showing a soccer player kicking a pumpkin-headed figure under the words “No to Halloween. Keep your traditions.” And altar contests that disqualified anything “foreign to our tradition.”

At the same time, the two holidays were already mixing in the markets. A craftsman in Toluca said that around then he had started making sugar skulls set inside pumpkins, “because they sell,” although the skulls were still the favorites: “they belong to us, to Mexico!” And the Halloween pumpkin, as it happens, is a Mexican plant.

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Can you celebrate both?

Many families do, and each finds its own way. In some homes the 31st is costume night and the 1st and 2nd are ofrenda days; others prefer just one. Both holidays have a history, and both say something about the people who celebrate them.

In the United States and Canada, the Day of the Dead now turns up in schools, libraries and museums, and a fair question comes with it: how do you take part if it isn’t your family’s tradition? Marchi traces the appropriation debate to the moment the skull became a costume in the 2010s. The view we share, from Mexico, is simple. Learn where it comes from, and keep the ofrenda for what it’s for: remembering someone real. A classroom altar with photos of the students’ own grandparents, pets or heroes is closer to the holiday than any skull costume.

One idea that works with kids: use both holidays to talk about the same thing from two sides. Halloween opens the conversation about fear; the Day of the Dead, about memory. And both are a good excuse to ask at home: who do we remember? What did they like to eat? What stories did they tell us?

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For home or the classroom

A two-circle Venn diagram. In one circle, what belongs only to Halloween; in the other, what belongs only to the Day of the Dead; in the middle, where they overlap, what they share. With the table above it takes fifteen minutes, and it gets a good conversation going. It works in English, Spanish or both, which makes it a natural fit for dual-language classes.

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Questions

What day is each one celebrated? Halloween is on October 31. The Day of the Dead is November 1 and 2; in many regions of Mexico it starts earlier, and in some places one day is set aside for children who have died.

Is the Day of the Dead pre-Hispanic? It has Indigenous roots and Catholic roots. The Mexica (Aztecs) honored their dead at other times of the year; the November dates arrived with the Spanish conquest, and the holiday grew out of that encounter. The full story is in why the Day of the Dead falls on November 1 and 2.

Is Halloween celebrated in Mexico? Yes, especially by kids, and increasingly alongside the Day of the Dead rather than instead of it. Where Halloween itself came from is in its own article.

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Sources

• 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 (in Spanish). Coahuila and Tepoztlán, p. 16; the Toluca craftsman, pp. 17–18.
• Francis Mershman, “All Saints’ Day” and “All Souls’ Day,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1907. All Saints · All Souls.
• UNESCO, “Indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead”, 2008.
• Regina Marchi, “U.S. Day of the Dead: Fusing Spanish, Indigenous and U.S. Cultures to Communicate New Messages,” Camino Real 3, no. 5, 2011, pp. 103–125. Open-access PDF.
• Colin Gunckel, “Charles and Ray Eames’s Day of the Dead (1957)…,” in Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film, Duke University Press, 2019. doi:10.1515/9781478090090-010.
• Nicholas Rogers, Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night, Oxford University Press, 2002.

Written by the Idunn Editorial Team, with support from AI tools in the research and drafting.

In Mexico, on the night of November 1, candles are lit on home altars and a path of marigold petals is laid so the dead can find their way home. That same night in Poland, cemeteries fill with thousands of candles glowing on the graves. In Guatemala, giant kites of colored tissue paper rise over a cemetery. In Bolivia, families set tables with breads and offerings to welcome their dead. And the evening before, across half the world, kids in costume are ringing doorbells for candy.

How do so many places, so far apart, remember their dead on nearly the same day?

Because of a calendar. November 1, All Saints’ Day, was set by the popes in Rome in the eighth century, and November 2, All Souls’ Day, was added by the monks of Cluny, in France, around the year 1000. The Church carried that calendar everywhere it went, and everywhere it mixed with local customs. That’s why these holidays are cousins: they share a grandmother. There are others, in Asia and in ancient Rome, that look a lot alike and fall on other dates, because they were born on their own. Those are lookalikes. This is the story of both families.

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Who put the dead in November?

Popes and monks, over four centuries. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1907:

• In 609 or 610, Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome to all the martyrs, on May 13.
• Between 731 and 741, Pope Gregory III consecrated a chapel to all the saints and set their feast on November 1.
• Between 827 and 844, Pope Gregory IV extended that date to the whole Church.
• Around the year 1000, Saint Odilo, abbot of the monastery of Cluny, ordered that every year, the day after, all the faithful departed be remembered: November 2. From Cluny the custom spread to other monasteries and then to the whole Church.

That’s how the pair was set: the 1st for the saints, the 2nd for all the dead. And the night before the 1st, the eve, is the one English called All Hallows’ Even: Halloween.

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How did that calendar reach Mexico?

With the Spanish conquest, in the sixteenth century. The Mexica (Aztecs) already honored their dead, but at a different time of year: two festivals in their calendar, the “little feast of the dead” and the “great feast of the dead,” fell toward the summer, between August and September, according to the magazine Arqueología Mexicana.

When the Catholic days of All Saints and All Souls arrived in November, the two traditions met. Out of that meeting, over the colonial period, came the Day of the Dead: a holiday that took shape on the Catholic calendar and, region by region, took in Indigenous practices. By the 1760s a friar in Mexico City saw an entire market of sugar figures made for those days, and people were already calling it the “Day of the Dead.”

UNESCO recognized it in 2008 as intangible cultural heritage, under a name worth saying in full: the Indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead.

And from Mexico it kept traveling: since the 1970s it has had a public life in the United States, starting with Chicano artists in Los Angeles and San Francisco. That chapter is in how Halloween came to North America.

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Where else are the dead remembered on those days?

In almost every place the Catholic calendar reached. Each one dressed it in its own way:

Where	When	How
Mexico	October 31 to November 2	Ofrendas (home altars), marigolds, candles, visits to the graves
Guatemala (Sumpango and Santiago Sacatepéquez)	November 1	Giant kites of tissue paper, months in the making, raised in the cemetery. UNESCO dates the tradition to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
Bolivia and Peru	November 1 and 2	Andean Todos Santos: tables of offerings to welcome the souls
La Paz, Bolivia	November 8	The Fiesta de las Ñatitas: skulls cared for by families, carried to the cemetery with flowers and candles. It closes the season of the dead
Poland	November 1 and 2	Mass visits to cemeteries, with thousands of candles on the graves
Philippines	November 1 and 2	Undas: families visit and keep vigil over their dead in the cemeteries
Brazil	November 2	Finados: visiting the graves
Ireland, Scotland, the United States, Canada and half the world	October 31	Halloween, the eve, with customs of its own

They’re all cousins: different on the outside, the same date on the inside.

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And the ones on other dates?

Some peoples remember their dead with great tenderness, in festivals that look remarkably similar, at other times of the year. They never had anything to do with Rome or Cluny.

Festival	Where	When	How
Obon	Japan	Summer (July or August)	Ancestors are welcomed home, people dance bon-odori and light lanterns
Ghost Festival	China and Chinese communities worldwide	Seventh month of the lunar calendar (August or September)	Offerings for ancestors and for wandering spirits with no family
Chuseok	Korea	Eighth lunar month (September or October)	A table of offerings for the ancestors
Pchum Ben	Cambodia	Fifteen days in a lunar month of September or October	Offerings to monks, to help the dead
Parentalia and Lemuria	Ancient Rome	February and May	Offerings at the tombs; and, in May, rites to drive spirits out of the house

These are lookalikes: they resemble each other because nearly everywhere, people want to remember those who have gone, and each people found its own way. Although within this family there are cousins too: Japan’s Obon and China’s Ghost Festival share the same Buddhist root.

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Does every culture honor the dead at the end of the harvest?

It’s often said. The idea of one great, universal festival of the dead at harvest’s end became very popular in the late nineteenth century, above all through the Scottish anthropologist James Frazer, who was looking for a single agricultural myth behind many customs.

What people who study it say today: it’s too easy a model. The folklorist Juliette Wood writes that Frazer and his speculations about a universal agrarian myth produced “an emotionally appealing, but far too glib a model” for explaining these customs. And the historian Ronald Hutton traces back to Frazer and John Rhys the idea that Samhain was “the feast of the dead.”

The dates make the point on their own: Obon is in summer, Parentalia in February, Lemuria in May, and Qingming, in China, in spring. What repeats is the wish to remember the dead. Each calendar sets the moment.

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Cousins and lookalikes, in one table

Family	Festivals	Why they’re alike
Cousins (Catholic calendar)	All Saints and All Souls, Halloween, Day of the Dead, Andean Todos Santos, Ñatitas, Guatemala’s kites, Undas, Finados, Poland’s November 1	They share dates because they come from the same calendar, which the Church carried everywhere
Cousins of each other (Buddhist root)	Obon, Ghost Festival	A shared religious root, on another date
Lookalikes (born on their own)	Chuseok, Pchum Ben, Qingming, Parentalia, Lemuria	They look alike because many cultures remember their dead, each on its own

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For home or the classroom

How does your family remember the people who are gone? Ask your grandparents what their families did on these days, wherever they grew up: what went on the altar or the grave, what was cooked, who was remembered. Write it down or draw it. Every family has its own version of the holiday, and in a classroom in the United States or Canada, the answers usually come from several of the places in these tables.

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Questions

Is the Day of the Dead the same as Halloween? They’re cousins: both lean on the calendar of All Saints and All Souls, and each took its own road. How they’re alike and how they differ is in Halloween vs. Day of the Dead.

Why is the Day of the Dead on November 1 and 2? Because those are the Catholic days of All Saints and All Souls, which arrived in Mexico with the Spanish conquest.

Which other countries celebrate the Day of the Dead? The Day of the Dead, with its ofrenda and marigolds, is Mexican, and today it’s also celebrated in many communities in the United States. On the same dates, Guatemala, Bolivia, Peru, the Philippines, Brazil and Poland remember their dead, each in its own way.

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Sources

• Francis Mershman, “All Saints’ Day” and “All Souls’ Day,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 1, 1907. All Saints · All Souls.
• 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 (in Spanish).
• Arqueología Mexicana, “Miccailhuitontli y huey miccaílhuitl” (in Spanish).
• UNESCO, “Indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead”, inscribed 2008.
• UNESCO, “Technique of making the giant kites of Santiago Sacatepéquez and Sumpango, Guatemala,” 2024. Multimedia archive.
• Gerardo Fernández Juárez, “La revuelta de las ‘ñatitas’…,” Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares 65, no. 1, 2010, pp. 185–214. doi:10.3989/rdtp.2010.006 (open access, in Spanish).
• Óscar Muñoz Morán, “Todos los Santos: tradición y ayllu andino,” Chungara 49, no. 2, 2017. doi:10.4067/S0717-73562017005000013 (open access, in Spanish).
• Sławoj Tanaś, “The profane sphere of All Saints’ Day and the social aspects of cemeteries,” Turyzm/Tourism 30, no. 2, 2020, pp. 91–99. doi:10.18778/0867-5856.30.2.25
• Stephen F. Teiser, The Ghost Festival in Medieval China, Princeton University Press, 1988. doi:10.1515/9780691222172
• Deborah Wong, Louder and Faster, University of California Press, 2019, ch. “Dancing the Body Politic: Obon and Bon-odori.” doi:10.1525/luminos.71.d (open access).
• John C. Holt, “Caring for the Dead Ritually in Cambodia,” Southeast Asian Studies 1, no. 1, 2012, pp. 3–75. doi:10.20495/seas.1.1_3 (open access).
• J. M. C. Toynbee, Death and Burial in the Roman World, Thames & Hudson, 1971.
• Juliette Wood, “‘The Great Scarecrow in Days Long Ago’: Gothic Myths and Family Festivals,” 2007. PDF.
• 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.

Written by the Idunn Editorial Team, with support from AI tools in the research and drafting.

Every fall, a character shows up on porches, in store windows and on classroom bulletin boards who’s more funny than frightening: plaid shirt, battered hat, straw poking out of the sleeves. The scarecrow has become as much a part of Halloween as the pumpkin or the witch. And yet it spent centuries out in the fields, guarding the crops, far from any holiday. How did it get here?

It came in with autumn. In the United States, from the early twentieth century, postcards and seasonal decorations gathered up everything that smelled of harvest —pumpkins, corn, straw— and the scarecrow came along in the bundle. Then stories, movies and front porches adopted it, and along the way it crossed paths with another seasonal character: Jack O’Lantern, the one with the glowing pumpkin. Here’s its story, sorted into what’s known and what’s just told.

To read aloud (ages 4 to 8)

Once upon a time there was a figure made of old clothes and a torn hat. Its job was to watch the cornfield so the birds wouldn’t eat the seeds. One day, people from town thought it looked so friendly that they took it home to decorate their front door in the fall. And that’s how the keeper of the field became a guest at Halloween.

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What was a scarecrow for?

Protecting the crops. A cross of sticks, clothes nobody wore anymore, a hat and sometimes a painted face: the idea was that birds would see “someone” in the field and go eat somewhere else.

In English, the word scarecrow could also mean the person who did that job: the figure and the field hand shared a name.

Every language gave it a name, and nearly all of them say the same thing: its job is to scare.

Where	What it’s called	What it means
English	scarecrow	scare-crow
Spanish	espantapájaros	scare-birds
French	épouvantail	the thing that frightens
Italian	spaventapasseri	scare-sparrows
Scotland	tattie bogle, tattie doolie	tattie is potato; a bogle is a goblin
Wales	bwgan brain	“crow ghost”
Japan	kakashi	scarecrow; in the fall it has its own festival, the kakashi matsuri

Today they’re rarely used on farms: automatic noisemakers and netting replaced them. And just as the fields stopped needing them, towns and cities started wanting them.

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How old are scarecrows?

Very old, though they’re hard to date. A rag figure hung on a pole doesn’t survive: it rots, burns or falls apart in the rain. So the firmest clues are written words.

Most of the uses of scarecrow recorded in the great historical dictionary of English, the Oxford English Dictionary, date from the sixteenth century on. The Welsh folklorist Juliette Wood, who studied the history of the scarecrow, points out that they were almost certainly in use earlier.

One of those early uses is Shakespeare’s. In Henry VI, Part 1, the soldier Talbot proudly reports what the enemy called him: “the terror of the French, / The scarecrow that affrights our children so.” Even then the word could be a joke: a scarecrow was more laughable than terrifying.

What gets repeated without a source: online you’ll read that the Egyptians made the first scarecrows, or that the Greeks carved figures of the god Priapus to guard their gardens “around 2500 BC.” We couldn’t find a serious source documenting either. In Priapus’s case the dates don’t work: his cult appears in Greece more than two thousand years later.

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Scarecrow myths: what’s told and what’s known

Quite a lot. And many of these ideas are repeated so often they sound like history. Here they are, with what people who checked them say:

The story goes that…	What’s known
The Celts put up scarecrows at Samhain to keep spirits away	Some say so, mostly on blogs and costume-shop websites. No document supports it
In the Middle Ages, scarecrows had turnip heads and were burned in a ritual at harvest’s end	Many probably did end up in end-of-season bonfires, like any old rag. There’s no evidence of a ritual (Wood)
The straw figures burned at some festivals stand in for ancient human sacrifices	This was a very popular idea among nineteenth-century folklorists, especially after James Frazer. Most anthropologists and folklorists today consider it unsupported (Wood)
The scarecrow has been a Halloween symbol since ancient times	It joined Halloween a little over a century ago, through the imagery of autumn. That’s the next section

Why do these stories keep circulating? Juliette Wood puts it nicely: we like to connect the past to the present in ways that feel true, even when there’s no bridge. A straw figure in a field looks ancient, and that’s enough for us to invent it an origin.

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How did the scarecrow get to Halloween?

In layers, over a little more than a hundred years, just like Halloween as a whole. Each layer has a date:

Year	What happened
1852	Nathaniel Hawthorne publishes “Feathertop”: a New England witch, Mother Rigby, builds a scarecrow with a pumpkin head, in which she “cut two holes for the eyes and a slit for the mouth,” and brings it to life. Witch, scarecrow and carved pumpkin, nearly half a century before Oz
From 1900	In the United States, postcards and seasonal decorations are printed for Halloween and Thanksgiving. The scarecrow appears as a friendly figure, usually a straw boy in a hat
1900	L. Frank Baum publishes The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The Scarecrow who wants a brain becomes the most famous scarecrow in the world
1904	In The Marvelous Land of Oz, Baum invents Jack Pumpkinhead: a figure of sticks with a carved pumpkin for a head, made to scare a witch. Scarecrow and jack-o’-lantern in a single character
1922	The Scarecrow: A Halloween Fantasy, a one-act play by J. A. Ferguson, is published in Scotland. The scarecrow now has Halloween in its title
1936	In England, Worzel Gummidge, a talking scarecrow, becomes a book, and years later a TV series
1940s	The Scarecrow appears as a villain in Batman comics. Its scary side begins
Late twentieth century	Scarecrow festivals multiply in towns across the United States, Canada, England and Australia. Many fall in October, alongside Halloween
Today	Plastic, store-bought scarecrows on porches and lawns from October into November

On the household calendar, the scarecrow is a bridge. In the United States it goes up with Halloween at the end of October, stays for Thanksgiving at the end of November, and then makes way for the snowman. In Canada, where Thanksgiving falls on the second Monday of October, it often arrives even earlier and simply stays through Halloween.

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What does it have to do with Jack O’Lantern?

A lot in looks, little in substance. Both sometimes wear a pumpkin for a head, both are out and about in October, and both have a bit of the trickster in them. That’s why they’re so easy to mix up, and why stories have put them together more than once.

But they come from different places:

	The scarecrow	Jack O’Lantern
What it is	A farm object, made to do a job	A character from legend, and the lantern named after him
Where it comes from	From planting, almost anywhere there are birds	From folktales of Ireland and Britain about a trickster who fooled the devil
What it does	Guards the field without moving	Wanders between heaven and hell carrying a light
Its head	Rag or burlap; the pumpkin head came with the stories	First he carries his light in a turnip or a pumpkin; over time the head itself becomes the lantern
When it joined Halloween	With the imagery of autumn, from 1900	With the carved pumpkin of North America, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Where they touch most is in two storybook characters: Hawthorne’s Feathertop (1852), a scarecrow with a carved pumpkin head, and Baum’s Jack Pumpkinhead (1904), a figure of sticks with a carved pumpkin head. Both are scarecrows from the neck down and Jack O’Lantern from the neck up. Juliette Wood explains it this way: the mischievous, trickster side of these characters is exactly what makes it so easy to blend the scarecrow with seasonal figures like Jack O’Lantern.

The full legend of Jack, with its versions and what’s known about it, has its own article.

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Why are scarecrows a little bit creepy?

Because they look like a person and aren’t one. They have clothes, a hat and sometimes a face, but they’re made of rags and straw. That “almost someone” feeling is the same shiver you get from dolls, statues or Frankenstein’s monster, who was also put together from spare parts.

Children’s stories almost always put the scarecrow on the good side: the Scarecrow of Oz keeps Dorothy company, and in many stories the figure comes to life to help. Horror movies use exactly the opposite. Both roads start from the same place: a figure that suddenly moves.

For a conversation at home or in class: what would you give your scarecrow to make it funny, and what would make it scary?

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How do you make a scarecrow at home?

A small one, for a table or a windowsill, comes together in an afternoon.

Materials: two wooden craft sticks or dowels (one long, one short), yarn or string, an old sock, stuffing (cotton balls, paper or fabric scraps), fabric scraps or a doll’s shirt, raffia or straw, a small paper hat, and markers.

1. The cross. Tie the short stick across the long one, a third of the way down from the top, wrapping the yarn in an X.
2. The head. Stuff the toe of the sock, tie it off and slide it over the top end. Draw the face with a marker: this is where you decide whether it’s funny or scary.
3. The clothes. Dress the cross in the fabric or shirt. A piece of string at the waist holds it in place.
4. The straw. Poke raffia or straw out of the sleeves, the collar and the hat.
5. The name. Every scarecrow has one. Write it on a slip of paper and hang it on.

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Questions

Is the scarecrow a Halloween symbol or a Day of the Dead symbol? Halloween’s, and above all autumn’s in North America. The Day of the Dead has its own symbols: the ofrenda, marigolds, sugar skulls. How the two holidays are alike and how they differ is in Halloween vs. Day of the Dead.

Do scarecrows actually scare birds? They work, up to a point: a figure that never moves stops being scary after a while. That’s why, as farms got bigger, they were gradually replaced by devices that make noise (Wood).

Was the Scarecrow of Oz the first storybook scarecrow? It’s the most famous, from 1900. There were scarecrows in stories and poems before it, including Hawthorne’s Feathertop; none became as well known.

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If you want to follow the thread, the carved pumpkin has a similar history, with a legend of its own attached: the legend of the jack-o’-lantern. And for the bigger picture, there’s where Halloween came from.

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Sources

• Juliette Wood, “‘The Great Scarecrow in Days Long Ago’: Gothic Myths and Family Festivals,” essay, 2007. PDF on the author’s website. Wood is a folklorist associated with Cardiff University and The Folklore Society. It’s an essay without peer review, and the most complete serious source we found on the subject.
• L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Chicago, George M. Hill, 1900; and The Marvelous Land of Oz, Chicago, Reilly & Britton, 1904.
• William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 1, act I, scene 4.
• J. A. Ferguson, The Scarecrow: A Halloween Fantasy in One Act, London and Glasgow, 1922.
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Feathertop: A Moralized Legend,” 1852; collected in Mosses from an Old Manse. Text on Project Gutenberg.
• Barbara Euphan Todd, Worzel Gummidge, the Scarecrow of Scatterbrook, 1936.

Written by the Idunn Editorial Team, with support from AI tools in the research and drafting.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.