Halloween is coming

Halloween is coming! It is right around the corner. The coolest and scariest holiday of the year is almost here.

Every one can enjoy it, for adults it is an opportunity to get dressed up and have fun at Halloween parties all night long. For kids it is an opportunity to get dressed up like their favorite super hero, or cartoon hero and have as many candies as they want.

In this article I have collected the most interesting and fun facts about Halloween which you might not know:

1. Halloween is over 2000 years old. It borrows traditions from a Celtic Harvest Festival “Samhain” that was held to celebrate the end of the harvest season.

2. One thread that runs through all Halloween legends is the belief that the night of October 31 st is the time when the spirits of the dead are freed to travel once more among the living.

3. The modern name of Halloween comes from “All Hallows’ Evening”. “Hallow” is an old English word for “holy person” and All Hallows’ Day is merely another name for All Saints’ Day. Thus, the correct spelling of Halloween is actually Hallowe’en.

4. The first Jack-o’-lantern were in fact made from turnips.

5. The story of the Jack-o’-lantern comes in many variants. But they all basically have the same gist: once a man named Jack tricked the Devil. And the Devil agreed never to take his soul. When Jack died he was barred from hell but he couldn’t go to heaven either as he had a life full of sins. So he was stuck on the Earth and began wandering for a resting place. To lighten his passage Jack used a carved out turnip with the ember (a small piece of burning coal in a dying fire) inside.

6. The function of the costumes and masks on Halloween is to hide the face of living from the ghosts and spirits of the dead.

7. Trick-or-treating originate from the ancient Celtic tradition of putting out treats for supernatural beings in order to appease them.

8. Stephen Clarke holds the Guinness World record for the world’s fastest pumpkin carving time: 24.03 seconds.

9. The record for most lighted Jack-o’-lanterns was set at Pumpkin Festival in Boston, Massachusetts when people lighted 30,128 carved pumpkins.

10. Simple references to Halloween traditions can cause panic among people who have Samhainophobia.

11. Americans spend more than $6 Billion on celebrating this holiday.

Find out some of the most weird, fascinating, and odd facts about the history of Halloween with history tutors on TutorZ.com!