Halloween, I just don't get it!

[Jhellis978]

As I reach my 27th year on this earth, I am amazed at how many adults live for the Halloween holiday.

Am I missing out on something? To me, Halloween is the most pointless holiday next to Columbus Day.

As a kid, there were definite perks to Halloween--the candy, costumes, etc. After turning 10, all of that kind of lost its flavor.

You look at your other major holidays and there are reasons to celebrate:

Thanksgiving: Food, football and family.

Christmas: Family and football

New Years Eve: Football and the promise of a fresh start

I was just hoping someone could give me a reason to celebrate Halloween.

[Scott]

Well I'm not gonna try to convince you to celebrate it but I will say why I love it.
While it is treated primarily as a child's holiday it can be fun, as an adult, to dress up and go to parties socialize with friends.
I enjoy that and also enjoy handing out treats to trick or treaters. Sometimes it's a great thing to have a holiday that you can focus on the kids and make them happy. It's a holiday that kids, teens and adults can all share.
To me I like it because it's a holiday that doesn't shove professional sports down my throat but instead gives me great horror films to watch.
This isn't all my reasons for loving the Holiday but are major points to me.
If you do research on the holiday you'll find it has a very rich history.

Scott

[Xander maddoX]

Well I'm not gonna try to convince you to celebrate it but I will say why I love it.
While it is treated primarily as a child's holiday it can be fun, as an adult, to dress up and go to parties socialize with friends.
I enjoy that and also enjoy handing out treats to trick or treaters. Sometimes it's a great thing to have a holiday that you can focus on the kids and make them happy. It's a holiday that kids, teens and adults can all share.
To me I like it because it's a holiday that doesn't shove professional sports down my throat but instead gives me great horror films to watch.
This isn't all my reasons for loving the Holiday but are major points to me.
If you do research on the holiday you'll find it has a very rich history.


you said it brotha, i really dont think i could put it any better myself. halloween is the one time a year the whole world acts like i do the rest of the time.....

[WEBGODDESS]

Am I missing out on something? To me, Halloween is the most pointless holiday next to Columbus Day.
I was just hoping someone could give me a reason to celebrate Halloween.

U forgot Easter :lol:
...seems to me you just not social or a party person...have some fun...forget the occasion...just celebrate, doesnt matter what :wink:
...life perhaps?

[kalina]

As I reach my 27th year on this earth, I am amazed at how many adults live for the Halloween holiday.

Am I missing out on something? To me, Halloween is the most pointless holiday next to Columbus Day.

As a kid, there were definite perks to Halloween--the candy, costumes, etc. After turning 10, all of that kind of lost its flavor.

You look at your other major holidays and there are reasons to celebrate:

Thanksgiving: Food, football and family.

Christmas: Family and football

New Years Eve: Football and the promise of a fresh start

I was just hoping someone could give me a reason to celebrate Halloween.

Halloween is the one night a year where even the most prejudiced, racist, KKK-infested redneck will don a dress and tolerate crossdressers, transsexuals, and other people who are different from them. :D

(wonders how many KKK dragons have transsexual feelings bottled up inside them... wonders maybe that's why they call themselves "dragons" :D )

[WEBGODDESS]

As I reach my 27th year on this earth, I am amazed at how many adults live for the Halloween holiday.

Am I missing out on something? To me, Halloween is the most pointless holiday next to Columbus Day.

As a kid, there were definite perks to Halloween--the candy, costumes, etc. After turning 10, all of that kind of lost its flavor.

You look at your other major holidays and there are reasons to celebrate:

Thanksgiving: Food, football and family.

Christmas: Family and football

New Years Eve: Football and the promise of a fresh start

I was just hoping someone could give me a reason to celebrate Halloween.

Halloween is the one night a year where even the most prejudiced, racist, KKK-infested redneck will don a dress and tolerate crossdressers, transsexuals, and other people who are different from them. :D

(wonders how many KKK dragons have transsexual feelings bottled up inside them... wonders maybe that's why they call themselves "dragons" :D )

Excuse You but Halloween has NOTHING 2 DO with race kkk wtf?
this is the Origins peepz geez :roll:


Halloween (Allhallows Even) was observed by some churches with religious services. However, most persons regarded it as a secular festival. In its strictly religious aspect, it is known as the vigil of Hallowmas or All Saints' Day, observed on November 1 by the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches.

The festival of Halloween is based on a combination of the Christian commemoration of the departed faithful (All Saints' Day) with the pre-Christian Celtic feast associated with a celebration of the end of summer and the Celtic New Year. Celts who lived in what is now known as Ireland, Scotland and parts of Great Britain celebrated their new year that began November 1. Allhallows' Even was observed on the evening of October 31st. Around 800 A.D., the day became known among Christians as Allhallomas which eventually changed to All Hallow E'en, or Halloween.

Celtic peoples adopted Christianity quickly, easily, and strongly. The conversion of Celtic peoples did not, however, keep them from celebrating some of their old customs. Attempts to replace the year-end custom in the old Celtic calendar were only partially successful. Some of our Halloween traditions date back to these early times.

Summer's end and the celebration of a good harvest has always been an important event in the life of agrarian peoples. Samhain "Hallowday" or Samfuin (sam + fuin) summer's end, marked the end of the yearly cycle and was celebrated with both religious and agrarian rites. It was the period for threshing and of food preparation for the winter season. On that evening, so it was believed, present, past, and future became one. Celts gave thanks for the safe return of their cattle to winter quarters, and invoked their gods for prosperity and good crops for the coming year.

Samhain was both the "end of summer" and a commemoration of the dead. The spirits of the departed were believed to visit their kinsmen in search of warmth and good cheer as winter approached. It was a time when evil, as well as good, spirits returned to the living. Fairies were believed to migrate from one home to another, and Hallowe'en was the time when humans kidnapped by elfin folk could reclaim their lost loves or relatives.

Jack-O'-Lanterns were scooped out of turnips with skull-like faces carved into them. This may reflect the ancient custom of placing skulls around the tribal fire to keep evil demons away. Bobbing for apples is a relic of the "Ordeal by Water," signifying the passage of the soul to the hereafter over the waters separating them. To encourage fertility, the Halloween cat, the black cat, became a familiar symbol of Halloween. Some believed that if you held a mirror and ate an apple at the same time, you would see the reflection of your future mate in the mirror.

Immigrants from Ireland, Scotland and England, brought secular Halloween customs to the U.S. but the festival did not become popular until the latter part of the 19th century, at the time of the mass immigration from Ireland after 1840. Halloween grew and changed over the years, with people, including those of other ethnic groups, adding (or subtracting) things from it. The association with ghosts and spirits goes back to older pagan customs. Germans took to celebrating Halloween with gusto. For them dressing up reminded them of "Fasnacht," "Karneval" and "Fasching" in the old country with masks and costumes; and witches and black cats reminded them of Walpurgisnacht and of fairy tales like "Hansel and Gretel."

Witches entered Halloween in the 19th century. One of the most important witches Sabbaths was held on Halloween. Witches were alleged to fly to these meetings on broomsticks, accompanied by black cats, who were their constant companions. Magical rites and ceremonies were performed by witches from all over the region at a sacred spot.

The U.S.-style Halloween was returned by the Irish and the Scots to the countries of origin and became popular in England since the late 1960s with one exception, "Trick or Treat," even the phrase was not then used (although it seems to become used now). Nor was it accepted that failure to offer a "treat" was grounds for trickery, pranks and even vandalism.

Halloween has also entered Germany. It is celebrated at Burg Frankenstein where a connection between the castle and Mary Shelley's novel has been established. (See "In Search Of Frankenstein" by Radu Florescu, Robson Books Ltd. London; and "Burg Frankenstein - Mythen, Märchen und das Monster" by Walter Scheele, Fouque-Verlag, Egelsbach).

Today some families and even parishes hold group celebrations, often with costumes of the saints, poor souls or famous Catholics and other elements, to reinforce the Christian side of Halloween's origins.

The tendency to manipulate (often for commercial gain) rather than to celebrate folk festivals reflects the growing influence of a rational outlook on life and the progressive loss of folk vitality. The secular character of American culture is reflected as well in the public neglect of the religious significance of Halloween. Only the children with their costumes, masks and the "trick or treat" custom, keep the spooky and irrational--even if only pretending--from becoming another casualty of modernity.

Capisca :twisted: :?:

[Jhellis978]

Isn't ironice how Halloween started off as a Christian holiday and evolved into a somewhat of pagan holiday, yet Easter was originally a pagan celebration hijaked by Christians.

[Ecstatic]

It didn't start off as Christian, rather, as Webgoddess says, it was the combination of Christian and pre-existing Celtic (pagan) observations in a single day. The Celtic observance is the original; Christianity throughout history has appropriated other religious holidays in order to enhance its preferential stature (the theory being that the average--then illiterate--person would want continuity of celebration and not bother all that much about the distinctions of philosophy or theology): the greatest example is Christmas itself, which (as the actual birthdate of Jesus was unknown) was adopted from the then more widely worshipped Mithra, whose birthdate orginally coincided with the winter solstice (but which, over the course of the 1000 years between 1000 BCE and the birth of Christ, had migrated a few days in the calendar).

Back to Samhain, the Celtic feast of the dead was named for Samana, the Lord of Death (The Leveller or the Grim Reaper). Holidays in the old Celtic calendar were celebrated on the eve rather than on the day. The Irish used to call the holy night the Vigil of Saman. Nice comment by Webgoddess on apple dunking, which to take it another step represented the Cauldron of Regeneration or Rebirth.

Interestingly, the history of Saman is very deep, as the Semitic god of the underworld was Sammael, whence came the Hebrew Samuel (though after shedding his "godhood"). And the observations extended throughout the ancient Celtic lands, which 2000 years ago rivaled the Roman Empire in extent if not in political and economic unity: the last European country to convert to Christianity was Lithuania, where they celebrated their New Year Feast at Halloween, sacrificing animals to the god Zimiennick (Samanik or Samana, the same).

The belief was widespread in pagan culture that the barriers between the ghostly or spriit world and the human or mortal world became very thin at the junctures between the seasons, allowing spirits to roam free.

[Jhellis978]

Very interesting stuff. I'm not really into spirituality, but I find it's impact on society to be interesting.

[Ecstatic]

It's amazing when you see the connections between various traditions which fundamentalists and zealots (not necessarily the same thing) in any tradition tend to supress. While the idea that Jesus travelled to India, China, Japan, and/or the British Isles during his "missing years" is highly improbable and quite unprovable, the fact of the matter is that there was substantial trade between the eastern Meditteranean and the East, especially India, at the time, and therefore highly likely that Jesus was exposed to some of the teachings of Buddhism (less likely Hinduism, because a) Buddhism, following the reign of Ashoka in the 3rd century BCE until the 8th century CE, was in the ascendent and b) was heavily exported throughout Asia), and his Sermon on the Mount is quite akin to one of Buddha's sermons like the sermon at Deer Park or the Diamond Sutra. Thomas, one of the twelve apostles, established a church in India after Jesus' death which survives to this day. Very interesting stuff, whether you look at it spiritually or socially.

it s to celebrate and remembering the dead like ur love ones friends and so on,every year on the 31st of october we go to the cemetery and put flowers on the tomb stone