Halloween is surely unique among festivals and holidays. While other popular calendar celebrations, including Christmas and Easter, have mixed pagan and Christian traditions, only Halloween has essentially split itself down the middle, offering up a secular or pagan festival on the night of 31 October and sombre religious observance on the day of 1 November. As with Valentine’s Day, many of those who celebrate Halloween are unaware of its Catholic history or meaning; but while Valentine’s Day has remained recognizably the same for at least a century, Halloween has transformed over and over again. What began as a pagan New Year’s celebration and a Christian commemoration of the dead has over time served as a harvest festival, a romantic night of mystery for young adults, an autumnal party for adults, a costumed begging ritual for children, a season for exploring fears in a controlled environment and, most recently, a heavily commercialized product exported by the United States to the rest of the world.
Halloween also has the unenviable distinction of being the most demonized of days: Christian groups decry it as ‘The Devil’s Birthday’, authorities fear its effect on public safety and nationalist leaders around the world denounce its importation for conflicting with their own native traditions. Some of these concerns may be valid, but they are all rooted in a history that compounds confusion and error with occasional fact. Perhaps because Halloween has always been connected with the macabre, those who have chronicled it in the past have frequently been less interested in accuracy than in dramatic and ghoulish ramblings.
Despite a history extending back well over a millennium, it’s only been within the last three decades that historians, folklorists and writers have begun to take the study of Halloween seriously. Even in that brief period of time, the day’s identity has shifted, making it difficult to produce a comprehensive and up-to-date overview. Within the last year alone, Halloween has expanded into parts of the world where it was previously unknown, and in its main home, America, industries spawned by Halloween are starting to move beyond mere October celebrations. Halloween is truly becoming more than just a (mostly American) mark on the calendar; it’s on the verge of blossoming into a global subculture.
Trick or Treat: The History of Halloween is the first book to look at both the history of the festival and its growth around the world in the twenty-first century. As such, it will hopefully serve to fill a gap in the understanding of Halloween, and to capture as detailed an image as possible of where it stands at this time – because, given the astonishing speed with which the festival continues to transform and expand, it’s an image that will undoubtedly change again soon.