Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe Quick Tips, where we root around in the candy buckets of food facts, and pull out the choice treats that WE want to eat. Today, we’re going to be tackling a topic that many have theoretically asked people like me, why exactly do we hand out candy on Halloween? I’m glad you hypothetically asked. Let me explain, and along the way, let’s go talk to our neighbors. This candy bucket was full of GENERIC candy, and a live frog. If we’re the only house on the block handing out good candy, I am gonna be peeved.

When You See Farmer Sam Stabbing Straw, that’s just Sam-Hayin’

This opener is certainly not going to tick anyone off. But basically, to understand Halloween, you have to understand how much Christianity LOVES robbing other religions for holidays.

Yes, Chrisitanity, the Grinch of the Pagan world.

In case you’ve somehow missed decades of pop culture, this is one of the parts of The Da Vinci Code they didn’t make up: a LOT of Christian holidays exist because there was a Pagan/Jewish holiday around a certain time, and the Christians said: “Alright, we can be the assholes who ended the Mid-Spring Party, OR, we can just come up with a reason that THIS DATE makes sense for US to party on too.” Romans and Greeks partied around the Winter Solstice CENTURIES before Jesus was supposedly born there. (And I don’t say “supposedly” there to attack anyone’s faith, but to REMIND people that, even if you hold that Jesus really did live and die as the Bible says he did, then it’s worth remembering that we’ve had TWO different calendars since his death. (The Julian Calendar was implemented around 10 years after the assumed dates for the death of Jesus, and the Gregorian calendar something like 1300-1400 years after that. Heck, scholar’s aren’t certain WHEN, exactly, Jesus lived and died. (The Bible is a little wobbly on dates, and, again, calendar changes. Jesus was presumably born sometime around the year 3 to 6, and died sometime around 36.)

THE POINT is, that as many women with dyed hair and septum piercings will gladly tell you, Halloween/All Hallow’s Eve also coincides/overlaps/completely appropriates a Celtic tradition known as Samhain, which marked the turning of the year from Light to Dark, and thus (maybe) the start of a new year. Oh, yeah, you thought we were only working with THREE CALENDARS? Oh no, buddy, Now we gotta do the IRISH Calendar! I hope you’re ready for absolute confusion!

It’s just the Julian Calendar with a couple oddities. Firstly, Days start at sunset. (Which…kinda makes sense, if you think about it, since that’s when the previous DAY, you know, ENDS.) and that the months are angled a couple over from what we’d think of as normal, with the year being broadly divided into a “Light” half (starting around May 1st), and a “Dark” half, starting around November 1st. Which, since November first starts the night BEFORE…Oh, look. A Night-Based Holiday.

You’re in for a wild night!

Samhain (pronounced as “sah-win” or “sow-in”, NOT “Sam-hay-in” as the title jokes, because, as Nate and I recently joked, ‘when the Irish language heard was that the new Alphabet was for English, it swore to ruin that uppity fucker’s life.” The Irish word délámhach is pronounced “TEE-LAY-WAH”, meaning ONLY THE VOWELS and one H do what the fuck they’re supposed to.(For a FURTHER explanation, it’s because Irish only adopted 18 letters of the Latin alphabet, H is usually silent, so they use it to represent when a consonant is pronounced differently. ) therefore represents the “nightfall” of the year, a time when the world grows dark. It was the end of harvesting season, and the time that they’d start slaughtering livestock. A time of death, when the barriers between the realm of fairies & spirits, and that of men and beasts, grew weak, and monsters and spirits could walk the land.

This led to a tradition called “guising”, where people would wear costumes of monsters and spirits in order to pass among them undetected. And, since fairies and spirits need gifts to be appeased (the bowl of cream on the patio), these guised people would stop at some houses and take/demand gifts, since they were pretending to be fairies. And if that sounds familiar, congratulations, you’ve identified where Trick or Treating comes from…partly. For the REST of that, we need to leave the Celts, and hit up the Catholics…with a quick stop to talk to the Manx first.

I assure you , they know what this means.
I don’t, but I’m told it’s important to them.

The Manx are the residents of The Isle of Man, which is, weirdly, like, the CENTER of The British Isles. It’s about 36 miles (50 kilometers) from the shores of England, AND (Northern) Ireland, 20 miles South of Scotland, 40 miles north of Wales, and 50 miles NE of Ireland. Normally, I would never speak of them, as I have a long-standing hatred of them due to an incident decades ago. It’s also, being a relatively isolated Island, kinda culturally weird: Manx, while a Celtic language, is distinct enough to be its OWN language, and most of the festivals, holidays, and traditions of the islands end up being…different on The Isle. For instance, instead of Samhain, the Manx celebrated Hop-tu-naa, a holiday festival where children make turnip lanterns, and go from door-to-door singing songs for coins or treats. Which is really just Christmas Caroling mixed with Trick-or-Treating. I bring it up mostly because A: that’s a cool fusion of ideas, B: it shows another take on the Jack o’ Lantern tradition, which was also part of Samhain, and C. Because the name of the festival is based on literal nonsense sounds in one of the songs they’d sing during the festival. That’s like if we started calling Christmas “Fala-lalala” because everyone sang Deck the Halls too much.

So let’s jump over to the CATHOLIC explanation/continuation of what happened here.

No Más, Just Mass.

So, we’ve got these pagan festivals clustered around the end of October. Interestingly, in about the year 600, the Catholic Church created a holiday called “All Saints Day”, during which they…honor all the Saints. Look, most names are pretty direct when you dig down to the meanings. And the EXACT date of this was…hard to pin down. It was first ordained in Rome on May 13th, which MIGHT have been to co-opt a local Roman pagan holiday where they exorcised their house of those ancestral spirits that had grown bitter/malevolent. (‘Hey, you use this day to drive out evil spirits? What a coincidence! This is a day devoted to all our most holy people! They must be the ones doing it!”) But it also might have been a coincidence: There was a Syrian saint who supposedly celebrated a feast that day a century or two earlier, so that might have been what the Pope wanted to honor.

The important thing was that, for some reason, that holiday REALLY didn’t stick there. Within a few hundred years, it was unofficially being celebrated during October, and then was OFFICIALLY changed to November 1st. Whether this was explicitly to try and co-opt Samhain, or if it had more practical explanations (Some historians have noted that Pilgrims gathering in Rome in May often suffered due to the heat at the time, with diseases spreading, and over-crowding being an issue) is up for some debate. WHAT ISN’T up for debate is the conflation of Guising with SOULING.

This picture will make more sense in a paragraph, but grab a cake for energy.

“Souling” was a thing that showed up in the Middle Ages in England and Ireland, and stop me if it sounds familiar: to honor the SPIRITS of lost family members, groups of children or beggars would DRESS UP as the lost spirits, or carry TURNIP LANTERNS to represent the lost souls, and would GO FROM HOUSE TO HOUSE offering to pray for lost souls and deceased family members in exchange for SWEET CAKES.

This is actually referenced, in all places, in SHAKESPEARE. One of the characters calls out another for being in love, he notes that he “speak[s] puling, like a beggar at Hallowmas”. And the whole affair just got super messy for…a couple hundred years. What part is Pagan, what part Christian, it all gets jumbled. Luckily, we can jump ahead to when things stabilized! Which is late 1800’s, early 1900’s, IN AMERICA. Kind of.

Buying in America

By this point, the whole “Halloween” thing has kind of sorted itself out, in that it’s knotted itself so thoroughly that no one knows which part is which any more. Like, that Shakespeare reference was 60-ish years into the Church of England being a thing, which was like 15 years after the Protestant Reformation. So there are ENTIRE NEW CHURCHES, with basically the same holidays, but now they gotta decide if they’re COOL with that. (Like, one big part of the Luteran Reformation was the idea that “maybe we care a little too much about the Saints”, which CANNOT have been good news for ALL SAINT’S DAY.)

Though pictures like this make me feel like we need to keep a CLOSER eye on the Saints…

This prompted a quick quasi-rewrite: “We’re actually honoring the HALLOWED DEAD. You know, EVERYONE who died and went to Heaven.” Which…well, it’s quasi because like, the FIRST All-Saints Day was dedicated to “the Blessed Mary and all the blessed martyrs”, and there are martyrs who aren’t saints, and vice-versa, so that was kind of always a part of it…Look, tracking religious dogma across centuries is like trying to summarize decades of Marvel continuity, with MUCH higher likelihood of pissing someone off if I’m wrong.

This is Throg, the Frog with the Power of Thor.
He used to be a University of Missouri football player, went pro, then lost his contract due to a leg injury. He found a new purpose in life doing charity work with his wife, until she died suddenly. Depressed and bereft, he sought the help of mediums and psychics to contact her spirit. When he met a witch who was able to tell him that his wife was PREGNANT when she died, but was unable to pay her, she TURNED HIM INTO A FROG.
He then joined the FEUDAL SOCIETY OF FROGS, until THOR, AS A FROG , showed up, and killed a bunch of rats that threatened the Frog fiefdom.. Throg got a sliver of Thor’s hammer, and became Throg.
All of that is 100% true. This is a Frog with the Power of Thor, who is a different person than “Thor when he was a frog”.

THE IMPORTANT THING is that British immigrants to America (Irish, Welsh, English, Scots, and Manx) for…no really well explained reason, just started doing the Guising/Souling thing in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. It MIGHT have been a matter of replicating/contrasting the current advances in culture: the late 1880’s were the Victorian era for England, where high-culture and refinement were seated, because I actually skipped an important note here: British immigrants to NORTH America. Not the United States. The earliest records of American guising, and later, Trick or Treating are actually from CANADA, in Ontario and Alberta. It’s recorded SHORTLY thereafter in Massachusetts and Detroit in the late 1910’s.

Then, the tradition picks up steam in the 20s and 30’s, though the Great Depression did put SOMETHING of a damper on it, and then it REALLY suffered during the sugar rationing of World War 2. But that actually helped it thrive and survive: because once the war was over, it was remembered as a little piece of a better time, and was leaned into HARD once sugar rationing was lifted in 1947. Radio programs of the era put out special Halloween episodes, Children’s magazines had big articles and spreads about it. Indeed, many of the episodes about Halloween had clueless adults being confronted by costumed children who had to explain the holiday to them. There were straight up PROTESTS about the idea of American children “begging in the street” for candy.

Look at this. Shameful.

This is possibly at least partly because we tended to be…well, a little more dickish when doing it: since we were no longer respecting the dead, or hiding from spirits, we really leaned into the “pranking” aspect of the holiday. Back when it started up in Canada and the Northeast, writers noted that Finding wagon wheels pulled off, gates gone missing, and so on was part of the “mostly harmless” fun of the evening. For DECADES, Detroit had a big problem with people committing ARSON the night before Halloween. Just, literally burning down houses for fun.

A lot of the weight behind the movement, it has to be noted, were due in part to commercial interests. As I’ve discussed many times, a lot of American businesses had to modernize and expand to meet the needs of World War 2, and following the war, needed to create a market to fill their excess production. M&Ms may have been INVENTED for Soldiers, but they were being sold to kids the INSTANT Mars candy company could swing it.

“Good Tactics” is a beautifully 1940’s way to describe giving chicks candy so they’ll fuck you.

And that’s how we got to today. There’s a lot I’ve brushed over: party games like bobbing for apples, or late-night bonfires have long been traditions attached to Samhain, modern trick or treating isn’t even the same across the US, let alone country to country: Many locations have the child PERFORM a “trick” to get their treat: telling a joke, singing a song, etc. But we’re already over 2,000 words, and SEVERAL hours late, and I’ve got to go start handing out candy, so it’s where we’ll end for now.

MONDAY: I’M STILL NOT 100% SURE, BUT PROBABLY LOOK FOR A MESS OF FOOD BASED ON FRIES.