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The origins of Halloween lie in the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, which in Celtic culture is a celebration of the end of the harvest. Samhain is sometimes considered to be the Celtic New Year.

This festival was traditionally the time for the Celtic pagans to gather their winter supplies and store them for the coming cold season and also to slaughter their cattle and other livestock and make and preserve meat products for winter food.

The Celts believed that at Halloween, the 31st October, the division between the living and the dead ceased to exist and the dead could cause problems for the living by bringing sickness to the people or causing their crops to fail.

So they would build large bonfires to keep the dead away and throw the bones of their slaughtered livestock into these fires as further protection.

The tradition of wearing costumes and masks goes back to these Celtic pagans who would wear these in an attempt to placate the evil spirits of the dead. In old Scottish tradition, young men dressed in white with masked faces would impersonate the dead.

Halloween was originally spelled Hallowe’en, a shortened form of All Hallows’ Eve and the day after was a religious festival in north European pagan tradition. In the 9th century the popes Gregory III and Gregory IV moved the christian festival of All Saints’ day from May 13 to November 1 to try and destroy the pagan festival of Halloween.

The pagan Celts would place a skeleton in their window to represent the dead. These lanterns where carved from turnips. The North American tradition of carving pumpkins came about because pumpkins were easier to carve and more plentiful than turnips. This tradition was originally associated with the harvest time and was not associated with Halloween until the late 19th century.