Halloween is a celebration we are all familiar with and is often a controversial one as well since various groups disagree with dressing up as monsters and other ghoulish creatures. A lot of organizations prefer to have fall festivals instead of Halloween celebrations believing it is an evil holiday but the history of it tells a different story. Halloween has its origins in the ancient Celtic celebration known as Samhain. It was a festival held at the end of the harvest season and is sometimes regarded as the Celtic New Year. It was a time the Celtic pagans inventoried their supplies and slaughtered livestock in preparation for winter. They also believed that October 31 blurred the lines between the living and the dead. The dead were dangerous to the living and were the cause of illness and crop damage or failure and the Celts wore masks and costumes to placate the spirits. 
The term Halloween is a shortened version of All Hallows’ Eve which was the evening of All Hallows’ Day and was a day of northern European pagan festivities which was known as All Saints Day by the church which was a Christian celebration that occurred on May 13 but was moved to November 1st by a couple of 9th century popes. The church measured the days as starting at sunset so All Saints Day and Halloween were celebrated on the same day for a while though now All Saints Day is celebrated the day after Halloween since that calendar system has not been used for centuries. Many in the church see it is a demon worshipping holiday but historically it is the day when the living and dead can communicate for a short time. Halloween as we know it was brought to America in 1840 by Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine in their country.
Some of the traditions and their activities have their roots in historical stories and events. The Romans added some of the Celtic traditions into their own culture and one of those is honoring the goddess Pomona. The symbol of Pomona is an apple which may be an explanation of the modern Halloween tradition of bobbing for apples. Over time the custom of dressing like witches and goblins became more ceremonial than a belief that the dead were actually walking the earth. Trick or Treating is believed to have started as a 9th century European custom known as souling. On November 2nd Christians would roam from village to village asking for pieces of bread with currants baked into them known as Soul Cakes. They would promise to say prayers for the recently deceased from any of the people who gave them the cakes and the prayers were believed to help the soul on its way to heaven. The jack-o-lantern is a holdover from Irish legends about a drunkard named Jack who tricked Satan into climbing a tree and carved a cross into the tree trapping Satan. The tale says that Jack died but was not admitted to heaven because of his bad ways and was not let into hell since he had tricked the devil. The devil gave him a glowing ember to light his way which Jack placed in a hollowed turnip to make the light last longer. The Irish used turnips initially as their Jack-o-lanterns but the newly arrived Irish in America found that hollowed pumpkins made better lanterns and they have been a fixture of Halloween since. Halloween has become a large holiday in America from both the economic and social aspects and only gets bigger each year regardless of how it is celebrated.
As the European continent fell under the influence of various political/cultural influences during the middle ages, costume would be manipulated to reflect a person’s cultural associations. In the history of costume and culture this is not unusual, as distinctions of status have always been manifest in costume to some extent. However, during the middle ages, as consolidated centers of power and influence developed and larger groups of diverse populations had to coexist, costume came to be a mechanism of enforcing societal norms in a way different from before.
Europe entered the middle ages, roughly 700- 1400 C.E., transformed by the establishment of new boundaries and the rise of new identities. The era of Charlemagne and the reinvestment of the papacy as a political contender in the West, the evolving regionalisms and vernacular traditions on the continent, the crusades into the Middle East, and the eminence of the unified religious movements of Christianity and Islam created consolidating and competing identities that needed to distinguish themselves from one another. In an example of this, religious affiliation was marked by variations in costume under Islam and Christianity.
Beginning in the 9th century in southern Europe, (and prior to this in the Middle East and northern Africa), as Islam established itself in political power, Jewish and Christian populations within their jurisdiction were distinguished from their Muslim neighbors by restrictions in clothing. Christian and Jewish populations were ordered to wear signs or markings on their headwear or variably told to wear head-coverings that marked them apart. Later, in the Arab kingdoms of the 14th century, Jews were designated to wear yellow clothing, Christians blue, and Samaritans red.
In the Christian-dominated European middle ages, Jewish populations would be ordered to distinguish themselves by wearing badges and certain headpieces. The badges would vary by region or by time period but were typically circular and yellow. In the history of costume, though, distinctions in certain appearance have their origins both in a community’s need self-identification as much a community’s need to impose identification upon others. The funnel-shaped hat worn by Jews in the middle ages is an example of how a costume choice made by a community was subsequently appropriated by the edicts of the dominant religion: the Council of Vienna in 1267 determined that Jewish communities had to wear these identifying hats, whereas it had been the headwear of choice for the Jewish communities for a long time prior.
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The line between what a community chooses for itself and what is imposed upon it, therefore, can be sometimes narrow as it is just as important for a community to maintain its identity, and set itself apart, as it is for it to integrate with a surrounding population. The impositions on Jewish and Christian identity under Islam, or on Muslim and Jewish identity under Christianity were manifestations of the societal need to enforce boundaries– something humans find themselves compelled to do to varying degrees of benefit, exclusion, and inclusion. | ||||||||||
*The Jewish poet Süßkind von Trimberg wearing a Jewish hat (Codex Manesse, 14-15th century)
*Costume of German Jews of the Thirteenth Century. Source: (From Herrad von Landsperg, “Luftgarten.”)
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