Someone posed a question the other day – "Why do we celebrate Halloween?" Needless to say the answers were many and vaired most revolving around chocolate and costumes, which is what halloween has come to mean to many peoeple nowadays.
One answer put forward that it began in Ireland and then spread to the US where it has become a huge holiday but it’s true origins lie much further back. Hallowe’en, or Samhein, is based on a pagan belief and is the night when the veil between the worlds is at it’s thinnest. A night when the dead can revisit there former home. It was a night when people left gifts of food for their ancestors and trod carefully in order not to offend the less than kindly otherworldly visitors that might be around. I suspect that many of those who visit are ctually not quite so scary and merely want to see what is going on!
There are many different beliefs about Hallowe’en and it’s equivalent festival in other cultures, what matters most is that we honor the traditions of each culture.