Field Notes ยท Reviewed August 23, 2026
Halloween as it is celebrated today is a layered holiday. Its date and some of its customs trace to Samhain, an Irish festival marking the end of harvest and the start of winter, while its name, its fires, and its sweets come from later Christian and American developments. The pumpkin lantern, the most recognizable symbol of the night, is a nineteenth-century American substitution for an older turnip tradition.
Where does Halloween come from and what was celebrated before it?
The short answer: Halloween descends from Samhain, a Gaelic festival held around November 1, combined over centuries with the Christian feasts of All Saints and All Souls, then reshaped by Irish and Scottish immigration to North America.
Samhain belongs to the older Celtic calendar, which divided the year into a light half and a dark half. The festival fell at the boundary between them, when cattle were brought down from summer pasture and the harvest was secured. In early Irish literature, Samhain is a time when the ordinary order loosens: the sidhe, or otherworldly dwellings, open, and figures from the other world can cross into this one. That is the root of the modern association between Halloween and ghosts.
The name Halloween itself is Christian. It is a contraction of All Hallows' Eve, the evening before All Saints' Day on November 1. The church did not simply replace Samhain; the two calendars overlapped, and practices drifted across the boundary. In Ireland and Scotland, people carried embers from communal bonfires to relight household hearths, and they went door to door reciting verses in exchange for food, a custom sometimes called souling or guising. Those practices are the ancestors of trick-or-treating.
For a fuller chronology of how these threads were woven together, The Hollow Lantern keeps a running account of samhain to halloween history, including the shift from communal bonfires to household decoration.
What exactly was Samhain?
Samhain was a pastoral and agricultural festival, not a night of organized devil worship. It marked the movement of herds and the close of the farming year, and it was observed with feasting, bonfires, and divination.
The medieval Irish texts that mention Samhain were written by Christian monks, often centuries after the events they describe, so they are not a neutral record. They do show, however, that the festival was a recognized assembly point: kings held courts, warriors gathered, and stories were told. Divination customs attached to the night, such as peeling an apple in one strip to see the initial of a future spouse, survived into modern folklore.
It is worth separating two claims that are often merged. The first is that Samhain was a real festival with real customs. That is well supported. The second is that Samhain was the origin of every Halloween practice, from costumes to candy. That is not. Many elements arrived later, from Christian, French, and American sources.
Why do we carve pumpkins for Halloween?
The pumpkin lantern is an American adaptation. The original carved vegetable was a turnip, and the practice is usually traced to Ireland and Scotland, where hollowed root vegetables were carved with faces and lit from within.
These lanterns were sometimes called jack-o'-lanterns, after a folk figure who was said to have been turned away from both heaven and hell and left to wander with a single ember in a hollowed turnip. The story varies by region, and no single version is authoritative.
When Irish and Scottish families settled in the United States in the nineteenth century, they found pumpkins plentiful, soft, and much easier to carve than turnips. The switch was practical. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the pumpkin lantern had become the standard American form, and printed imagery of it spread through postcards and magazines.
How did the date and the customs move?
The date settled gradually. All Saints' Day was fixed on November 1 by the church, and All Souls' Day followed on November 2. The evening before, October 31, became the focus of the folk observances that had once clustered around Samhain.
In the United States, Halloween became a community event in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with parades and parties rather than door-to-door begging. Trick-or-treating as a mass practice is generally dated to the 1930s and after, and it grew sharply in the post-war suburbs. The candy industry noticed, and by the 1970s individually wrapped sweets had replaced the homemade treats of earlier decades.
What survives of the older folklore?
Several customs still carry traces of the older night. Bobbing for apples echoes the divination games of the harvest season. Bonfires, where they are still lit, recall the communal fires of Samhain and of later saints' eve celebrations. The idea that the veil between worlds is thin on this night is a literary and folk inheritance rather than a doctrine.
Other supposed traditions are more recent than they appear. The black cat as a Halloween symbol is largely a nineteenth-century American development, and the association of Halloween with heavy decoration is a twentieth-century retail phenomenon. Treating these as ancient can lead to confusion when comparing sources.
Practical notes for readers
If you are tracing a specific custom, check the date of the source before the claim. Early Irish texts, nineteenth-century American newspapers, and mid-century greeting cards describe very different holidays under the same name. Note also that many popular summaries repeat each other without citing anything, so a claim that appears in ten places may still rest on one weak original.
For families, the folklore is the easy part. The practical part is the evening itself: lit candles inside carved pumpkins, open flames on porches, and dark costumes near roads. Those are the risks worth planning around, and they are separate from the history. The older customs were communal and seasonal, tied to harvest and herd, and they were never designed for a modern suburban street.
Read the history for what it is: a record of how people marked the turning of the year, and how those marks were carried across an ocean and remade.
Seasonal customs survive by being repeated, not by being frozen. The same is true of the practices behind Halloween origins and Samhain: turnips gave way to pumpkins, and community bonfires became porch lights. Other traditions follow the same pattern, adapted to climate and local ingredients. A first visit to a Japanese hot spring, for example, involves its own unwritten rules about washing before entering the water and about which foods are cooked in the spring itself. Readers curious about how such customs are learned and passed on can find a practical guide in the Field Notes section.
