Transcripts

Mike Carruthers:
How long have people been celebrating Halloween?

Kenneth C. Davis:
Halloween really began about two thousand years ago at an Irish bonfire you could say. But we've been celebrating it in America really since colonial times, primarily since the Irish started coming over.

Kenneth C. Davis, author of the book, Don't Know Much About Mythology says there are a lot of misconceptions about Halloween.

There are a lot of people who will say it's about Satanism and evil and witchcraft, but it's really not. What the Celtic people or Keltic people were celebrating, thousands of years ago on a moonlit night was actually a harvest festival combined with a New Year festival. And it was also a day where they thought that the barriers between the world of the living and the dead separated. And that the dead would come and walk around, and you didn't have to be frightened from them so much. But to keep them away from the village, people started to don masks to sort of frighten the spirits away and also to lead them away from the village.

These celebrations almost always included a bonfire, which signaled the beginning of trick or treating.

To start the bonfire, the big village bonfire, the children went door to door to collect wood for the bonfire, so that's part of it. That further developed in the Middle Ages, children would go door to door to what they would call souling. And they would ask for a little soul cake. In exchange for the soul cake they would say a prayer for the departed.

On Monday the origin of the jack-o-lantern. I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.