Halloween in America
Halloween came to America when colonials came to New England. In addition to the split colonial immigrants, the combination of European groups and Native Americans created this new branch of Halloween, closer to the holiday we know today as. The first celebration of this new Halloween included play parties, which included telling scary stories, dancing, and singing. These festivals also included telling frightening stories of ghosts and other unnatural occurrences. These parties and festivals became very commonly celebrated around the 19th century, but not everywhere.
Trick-or-Treat
Let's go back to when the Christians spread across the Celtic lands. During this time on Halloween, poor households would visit the homes of wealthier families and receive certain pastries called soul cakes. In exchange, the low-income families would pray for the souls of the wealthy family's dead relatives. This was called "souling," which children would be the primary demographic to go door to door asking for food, money, and alcohol. In Scotland and Ireland, similar to the Celts, the children would also engage in guising, where they dress up in costumes and go door to door accepting gifts. However, instead of praying for the dead, the children would sing songs, recite a poem, tell jokes or do some other sort of "trick" to amuse the household tenants.
However, Guy Fawkes Night is more related to modern-day Trick-or-Treating activities. This celebration began on November 5th, 1606, where many Roman Catholic conspirators planned to blow up England's King James 1 and the Parliament building. These efforts were made to stop any further persecution of Roman Catholics by the English government. Guy Fawkes was one of the conspirators. This event marked November 5th as Guy Fawkes Night, where the townspeople (including children) set off fireworks, lit bonfires, wore masks, carried and burned Fawkes effigies, and asked for pennies.
Many American colonists also celebrated Guy Fawkes Night, and during the 19th century, many more immigrants who were fleeing Europe also contributed to popularizing Halloween in the United States. When the 20th century came, souling and guising were also implemented during the Halloween holidays.
Spooky Capitalism
So far, we've seen that Halloween is a holiday that people mainly celebrate to have fun, but there is a money-grabbing dark side of this already spooky holiday. Back in 2018, the Candy Industry (yes, that's an actual organization) recorded a total of $9 billion in candy sales. But candy isn't the only thing that's selling during Halloween. Costumes and decorations take up a substantial portion of the overall amount of money spent for Halloween. More specifically, Spirit Halloween reported they had reeled in $8.4 billion off costumes and decorations in one year. Halloween is slowly becoming a more expensive American holiday than Christmas, given that Halloween is celebrated between family and friends. Eventually, Halloween became a holiday that some people regard as problematic. The problem originated as some costumes are deemed culturally appropriate and encourage child obesity with obsessive consumption of candy and sometimes mocking specific religions, among other reasons. In addition, the United States also contributes to foreign countries in manufacturing these costumes and decorations. Most of these countries work in poor conditions and receive a minimum wage.
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