Halloween is derived from Sahmain, pronounced Sow min, a Celtic festival celebrating Celtic New Year. So, Halloween is really just Celtic New Year's Eve. 2,000 years ago, back in what is today Ireland, Scotland and Northern France, Celts would get together and bob for corned beef and make candied cabbage in preparation for the coming hard winter of hard drinking.
Eventually, the church stepped in, because, you know, they're the church, and made November 1 All Saints' Day. Later that was changed to All Souls day because saints became fewer and less impressive as the 19th century progressed. At one time to be canonized, one had to heal blindness or speak directly with God. As the age of enlightenment advanced, people became saints just for waiting patiently behind someone in the express lane with 14 items, paying by check.
Meanwhile, in South and Central America, Latin cultures celebrated Dia de la Muerte, another celebration of dead people, in which children and adults alike dressed up as ghosts to blend in with the walking dead in the hopes they wouldn't be recognized as living and dragged off to the netherworld. This festival continues today as the age of enlightenment has not yet hit this part of the world.
As these two cultures converged on the U.S., forming the backbone of our society by becoming the migrant workers, drug dealers, pimps, busboys, cops, mobsters and wife abusing alcoholics that make our country great, today's Halloween festival took shape. Traditions once inherent to one culture of origin merged into what we now see as our annual harvest festival. For instance, the Latins brought their unique fruit picking abilities allowing bobbing for apples to replace the traditional bobbing for corned beef.
Costumes, too, became normalized. Instead of dressing in celebratory garb or as a ghost or ghoul, modern times saw the emergence of costumes celebrating our culture's heroes; such as the "naughty nurse" and Richard Nixon.
Children, once the stars of the modern Halloween costume tradition are now often disallowed from dressing up at all. Schools, which only 20 years ago took off the entire day to have parties and parades for the children to show off their costumes now largely ignore the holiday as it has been deemed offensive to the large population of Celts and Ancient Incas still in America, today.
Trick or treating itself is the product of a confluence of ancient cultures. For instance, those crazy Celts called it "souling". Poor children, referred to as "Lambs of God" would wander from house to house, accepting alms in return for prayers and songs in honor of the dead. Mysteriously, many of these so-called Lambs never returned back to the common house after souling and early November's mutton stew was said to be the best of the season and revered throughout the culture.
This "corpse caroling" evolved into Christmas caroling, where tone deaf people drinking brandy besiege whole neighborhoods singing for handouts. Along with fruitcake and spending time with the in-laws, Christmas caroling is revered as much for its commonly held hatred than anything else.
Meanwhile, Trick or treating morphed into a less somber parade of costumed children racing through modern suburban streets under the protection of parents armed with six-packs of moderately priced beer in an effort to get home before being run down by the texting drivers and serial killers, which have by now become the two most prevalent personality archetypes of modern society.
An increasingly common disguise for the children is that of "the surly teenager". Likely because it costs so little to create, this costume is made up of ill fitting clothes that smell like cigarettes and some peach fuzz or stubble makeup. The children then wander around in a sullen fashion pretending not to enjoy themselves and acting ironically while they beg for candy. Often, the surly teens make several passes at each house, turning their act into a downright menacing routine if they are called out for the repeat visit by the home owner.
Modern fundamentalist Christians take issue with today's Halloween, citing its pagan roots as a reason why the holiday shouldn't be celebrated. This of course ignores the fact that all good things came from pagans, because at one time, prior to 2,000 years ago, everyone was either a pagan or a Jew. Pagans were by far the better partiers being that they eat pork and cheeseburgers and don't only have sex through holes in the bed sheets. There is also no pagan word for "attonement", but there are records of as many as 250 festivals per year celebrating debauchery.
Also, a growing number of Christians and secularists alike don't care for children associating death with joy and happiness, preferring instead to keep death as a mysterious and scary thing to be avoided at all costs if possible. In essence, modern parents often treat talking about death like they treat educating their children about sex - "avoid it if you can... good talk, scooter."
The people in this movement believe Halloween should be stopped completely, replaced with a fall "Childrens' Festival", because today's children don't apparently have a high enough sense of self-importance feeding their petulance.
Candy corn was created in the the 1930s by the government of the USA. A happy accident, candy corn was to originally be the vessel of lethal drugs for inmates on death row. However, the Supreme Court ruled candy corn to be unconstitutional, saying in effect, "Yes, you can kill a guy, but there is no way you can torture him by making him eat candied corn (as it was called at the time) to do it."
The government went on to produce 400,000,000,000,000,000 of the treats which are still in circulation to this day. No one knows precisely what would happen if one were to be eaten, as it never comes up.
Fully 25% of all the candy purchased and consumed in North America is done so for Halloween, bolstering the strength of the billions of dollar industry. Concerned parents are encouraged to parse out their childrens' gains carefully so as to avoid obesity and gut rot; because after all, the only way to get a candy bar the size of a fart is to dress up in costume and beg for it between the hours of 4pm and 8pm one night per year. The rest of the time, you can only find the full size and king size versions of the same candy which are held in wide disdain and aren't very popular at all.
Our modern festival of Halloween has a rich tradition borne of many customs and norms. As with many societal celebrations, Halloween came from many sources and was mashed, heated, twisted cajoled and, yes, eventually extruded into the candy bar shaped tradition that exists today, which we so richly could totally do without.
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