Halloween Origins: The Ancient Celtic Festival That Became a Candy Holiday

Episode 0008: Jonny Hoffner - Good > Safe

Jonny Hoffner of Paper Antler Photography and Good Lion Golf on 17 years of wedding photography, building two creative businesses, and why good doesn't have to mean safe.

Every year, in late October, millions of people dress up as ghosts, witches, monsters, and cartoon characters, carve faces into vegetables, and hand candy to strangers’ children. If you stepped back and looked at it fresh, it would seem like an extraordinarily strange thing for a modern society to do.

But Halloween makes more sense once you know where it came from.

The holiday has ancient roots in a Celtic harvest festival called Samhain, passed through Roman conquest, Christian accommodation, and Irish and Scottish immigration to America, and was eventually shaped by candy companies into the form we recognize today. Each stage left its mark. Almost nothing about the holiday is what it first appears to be.

Samhain: the Celtic new year

The story starts more than 2,000 years ago, in what is now Ireland, Scotland, and parts of northern France.

The ancient Celts divided their year into two halves. The light half ran from May to October. The dark half ran from November to April. Samhain (pronounced SAH-win) marked the transition between them: the last day of October, the first day of November, the threshold between the living world and what came next.

It was a harvest festival. Crops had to be gathered before winter. Animals were brought in from the fields or slaughtered for the season. Food was preserved and stores were tallied. Life and death were literally in the air.

The Celts believed that on the night of Samhain, the boundary between the living and the dead grew thin. Spirits of the dead could cross over. The Aos Si, the supernatural beings of Celtic tradition, moved freely through the world. Some were benevolent. Many were not.

Bonfires were lit on hilltops. People gathered around them to burn crops and animals as offerings, to ward off wandering spirits, and to ask for protection through the dark months ahead. When they returned home, they re-lit their hearth fires from the communal bonfire, carrying its protective flame into the household.

The Celts also wore costumes. Not for fun, but for protection. If spirits and supernatural creatures were loose in the world, it was safer to look like one of them. Disguise was a form of camouflage.

The Romans arrive

When the Roman Empire expanded into Celtic territory around 43 CE, it brought two autumn festivals of its own.

The first was Feralia, a late October day commemorating the passing of the dead. The second was a festival honoring Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. Her symbol was the apple.

As Roman and Celtic cultures merged over several centuries, these festivals blended with Samhain. Historians believe the apple connection from Pomona may be the distant root of bobbing for apples, one of Halloween’s oldest games.

The church takes a turn

By the 7th century CE, the Catholic Church was working to absorb and redirect pagan festivals throughout Europe. Pope Boniface IV established All Saints’ Day on May 13th in 609 CE, a day to honor all Christian martyrs and saints. In the 8th century, Pope Gregory III moved it to November 1st.

The timing was almost certainly deliberate. The night before All Saints’ Day, October 31st, became known as All Hallows’ Eve: the evening before the holy day. All Hallows’ Eve contracted over centuries into Hallowe’en and eventually Halloween.

November 2nd was added as All Souls’ Day, a day for praying for the souls of the dead. Together, the three days formed Allhallowtide, a period at the edge of winter when the church encouraged contemplation of death and the afterlife.

Some of the old Samhain customs continued underneath the church calendar, not because the church approved of them, but because cultural practices are harder to erase than dates. The bonfires, the disguises, the sense that something moved in the night on October 31st: all of it persisted in folk tradition.

Carved vegetables

The jack-o-lantern is now associated with pumpkins, a North American vegetable. But the tradition began in Ireland and Scotland with turnips.

The name comes from the legend of Stingy Jack, a trickster figure from Irish folklore who, according to the story, managed to trick the devil twice and was consequently barred from both heaven and hell after his death. He wandered the earth in darkness, carrying a lantern made from a hollowed-out turnip with a burning coal inside.

To ward off Jack and other wandering spirits, Irish and Scottish families carved frightening faces into turnips and placed them in windows and doorways on the night of Samhain. The carved face was meant to scare off evil rather than attract visitors.

When Irish and Scottish immigrants arrived in North America in large numbers in the 19th century, they brought the tradition with them. They found that pumpkins, native to the Americas, were far easier to carve than turnips. The substitution stuck.

Halloween comes to America

Irish immigration shaped American Halloween more than any other single influence. The Great Famine of the 1840s drove more than a million Irish people to America, bringing Samhain traditions, All Hallows’ Eve customs, and a rich folk culture built around October 31st.

Scottish immigrants brought their own version of the traditions. By the late 19th century, Halloween was established in the American calendar, though it looked different from what we know today. Community events, parties, and seasonal rituals were common, but the modern structure of trick-or-treating had not yet emerged.

The holiday was still somewhat spooky and adult. It involved fortune-telling games, bonfires, and a general awareness of its connection to death and the supernatural.

The invention of trick-or-treating

Trick-or-treating is surprisingly recent.

The practice became widespread in the United States only in the 1920s and 1930s. Before that, Halloween was sometimes associated with pranks and mild vandalism: tipping outhouses, soaping windows, unhinging gates. Communities and civic organizations pushed for a more organized, family-friendly version of the holiday partly to redirect this energy.

The term “trick or treat” appeared in American print for the first time in 1927. By the 1950s, the practice was standardized and widespread: children in costumes going door to door, receiving candy in exchange for not causing mischief.

The candy industry played a significant role in that standardization. Through the mid-20th century, candy companies actively promoted Halloween as a candy holiday. They marketed individual wrapped candies as the appropriate thing to give, replacing the homemade treats, coins, and fruit that had previously been common. By the 1970s, concerns about tampered homemade treats (largely moral panic rather than documented incidents) had completed the shift to commercially wrapped candy as the only acceptable gift.

The modern Halloween was, in part, a marketing achievement.

Why Halloween survived modernization

Many ancient festivals faded as the cultures that created them changed. Samhain-into-Halloween didn’t fade. It transformed, but it kept something essential.

Part of the answer is the holiday’s relationship with death. Halloween gives people a sanctioned space to be curious about something most of modern culture avoids. Costumes, haunted houses, horror films, and carved faces exist partly because humans need occasional permission to look at mortality directly. Halloween provides it, wrapped in enough fun to make it bearable.

Part of the answer is the seasonal timing. October 31st falls at a genuinely liminal moment in the Northern Hemisphere: after the harvest, before winter, in the days when light fades noticeably. The Celts were responding to something real in their environment when they created Samhain, and that environmental reality hasn’t changed.

And part of the answer is that dressing up, going out in the dark, and getting candy is just fun. Sometimes the ancient psychology and the commercial holiday point in the same direction.

The traditions and what they actually mean

If you celebrate Halloween, you’re probably doing several things without knowing where they came from:

Costumes: The Celtic practice of disguising yourself to avoid detection by spirits, preserved through folk custom and reinvented as play.

Jack-o-lanterns: Irish protection charms against wandering spirits, translated from turnips to pumpkins on American soil.

Trick-or-treating: A 20th-century American invention with older roots in medieval “souling” (the poor going door to door offering prayers for the dead in exchange for food) and Scottish “guising” (going door to door in costume to perform a song or poem for reward).

Black and orange: Black for death and the darkness of the season; orange for the harvest and the autumn leaves.

Bobbing for apples: Probably connected to the Roman goddess Pomona, goddess of fruit trees, whose festival blended with Samhain under Roman rule.

None of these traditions were designed together. They accumulated across centuries, cultures, and continents, and arrived at the same night by different roads.

The next time you hand out candy or carve a pumpkin, you’re participating in a tradition that stretches back more than two thousand years. The costumes, the carved faces, the sense that something strange and slightly dangerous moves in the October dark: the Celts felt it too. They just had different words for it.

For more on the traditions we practice without questioning, explore the origins of everyday customs.