Last Monday, I attended the Table Talk about the history of Halloween. It began as a pagan holiday, and continued to evolve under the Catholic Church as All Hallows’ Eve in conjunction with All Saints’ Day. What I found most interesting was the more recent history of Halloween in the United States, where it has become an enormous consumer holiday (second only to Christmas) and Americans spend billions of dollars on candy and costumes every year. With some of the people around me, I ended up discussing the nature of commercial holidays in the US, and how even religious observances such as Christmas and Easter have, for many people, developed into almost secular celebration centered around gift giving and Easter egg hunts, respectively. GRF Seema brought her own experiences into the discussion, suggesting that Halloween is celebrated so extravagantly because Americans have relatively few annual festivals, whereas in India there are festivals and holidays throughout the year.
Rose Scholars Fall 2017
Endless possibilities
The thing about having so few holidays being the reason Halloween is so celebrated is interesting. I read another explanation that it can be considered a holiday where it’s accepted to break away from typical society expectations that are common in rigid societies like ours. Following that theory, Halloween is a night of organized disorder like Carnival before social pressures of Thanksgiving and Christmas. I guess we’ll never really know and be able to pinpoint why it became so big in the U.S.