Hallowe'en is today, and with it comes a lot of spectacle: trick-or-treating festivities in town squares, neighborhoods, churches, and other community centres; pumpkin carving contests; the season finales of all those the Hallowe'en baking shows that air on the Home Network (albeit that may be a more niche family tradition); and, of course, the honoured tradition of Christians and Neopagans telling everyone how demonic Hallowe'en is and how you should either never celebrate it, you dirty sinner, or that you should promptly buy a goat and join in the blood sacrifice at 7:00 pm (followed by the costume contest at 7:30 pm).
Growing up Protestant in the Southern United States, I always celebrated Hallowe'en as a secular holiday, but also always had some friends who came from fundamentalist families and were excluded from the sugar-and-cartoon-character-costume-fueled festivities. The charge always came in the following form: Hallowe'en is a pagan holiday that promotes devil worship (and was co-opted by Catholics). As the culture continued to move more and more quickly towards adopting Neopaganism, the charge stayed the same. However, instead of vehemently condemning the day as an outrageous excuse to adore at the altar of Baphomet, Neopagans now commend the day as a sacrosanct excuse to adore at the altar of Baphomet.
There is a very simple problem with both of these charges, and it is that they are simply and laughably wrong. Not only has Hallowe'en always been a Christian holiday, but it is also a holiday that by all accounts has its origins strictly in Catholic piety, cultural practice, and superstition. Hallowe'en is not only a very Catholic holiday, but a glance at the history of Hallowe'en will reveal that is such a blatant, unabashed display of mackerel-snapping papistry that it is borderline obnoxious.
The Origins of Hallowmas and Allhallowtide
The word "Hallowe'en" (or "Halloween") is a contraction of "Hallows' Even," which is the evening before the feast of All Saint's Day, traditionally known as All Hallows' Day or Hallowmas. To understand Hallowe'en, then, we must understand Hallowmas.
Once Christianity was legalised by Constantine's Edict of Milan (313), public celebrations and observances of Christian holy days began to spread. One of these holy days was some celebration of all Christian Saints and Martyrs, which developed out of practicality: there were simply not enough calendar days to ensure that every single Saint would be able to have their own particular holy day. Thus, different feasts commemorating all Saints began to be celebrated throughout the Church, ensuring that all those hallowed men and women of Christ who comprise the Church Triumphant would be remembered and venerated in the public worship of the Church Militant.
The dates of these celebrations varied from diocese to diocese, with many Eastern Churches choosing a time around Easter or Pentecost and the Church of Rome celebrating the feast on May 13, when the Roman Pantheon was consecrated as the Cathedral to All Saints in 609 by Pope Boniface IV. Over time, the entire Western Church began celebrating Hallowmas on November 1, with the date being transferred in the diocese of Rome by Pope Gregory III to coincide with the consecration of an oratory within the old St. Peter's Basilica in the mid-700s. This date either originated with or quickly spread to England, before then spreading to France during the reign of Louis the Pious. Eventually, the May 13 date was officially suppressed, and November 1 became the date of Hallowmas for the entire Latin Church.
It is a common misconception that the dating of Hallowmas to November 1 was done by the Church as a way to Christianize the Gaelic holiday Samhain. However, this does not seem to be the case for a few reasons. First, Samhain was a Gaelic holiday observed primarily by the Celts and the Scots. It makes little sense that a very region-specific observance would influence the calendar of the Universal Church. Second, as seen above, the dates of Hallowmas varied and oftentimes regions would have multiple All Saints celebrations. For example, there is evidence that the Irish had at least two All Saints days: All Saints of Europe in April and All Saints of the World in November. It is highly likely that Hallowmas and Samhain sharing a date is completely coincidental.
Historically in the Roman Catholic Church, all first-class feast days (now called Solemnities) had a vigil before the day of the feast in which Christians would pray and fast in preparation for the next day's festivities. In its dating, Hallowe’en thus has no connection to paganism but is instead a preparation for the feast of All Saints' Day.
Christian Practice and Hallowe’en Tradition
One Hallowmas tradition has always been the veneration of relics: kneeling before the bones and belongings of the Saints as aids to prayer and powerful sacramentals that draw us ever nearer to God and His Saints. While it was a common practice to have at least one relic present in the stone of the main altar, some parishes were too poor to have relics of Saints readily available for public veneration. To remedy this problem, on Hallowmas parishioners would dress up as Saints and make themselves stand-ins for relics. It was also a common superstitious belief that vengeful spirits roamed the earth during Allhallowstide, and that masks and other disguises would prevent harm from befalling people. From these, we see the practice of dressing up arise. Likewise, the tradition of carving Jack-o-Lanterns originated as a practice to ward away vengeful spirits and to represent the souls of the faithful's departed loved ones.
As Hallowmas' and Hallowe’en's dates became fixed with time, so with time did the celebration of All Souls' Day become connected with the celebration of Hallowmas. All Souls' is similar to Hallowmas in that it celebrates the faithful departed, but rather than seek the aid of the Church Triumphant, it encourages us to come to the aid of the Church Penitent: those poor souls in purgatory. This line of three days celebrating the departed would eventually form the triduum of Allhallowtide.
Many different customs and traditions, some superstitious and maybe borrowed from pagan roots, came about to form the All Souls' celebrations. Among them was the tradition of souling. On Hallowmas (which was also All Soul's Eve), people would bake small bread cakes with crosses in the centres, known as soul cakes, as a small offering for the souls of their departed relatives. These would often be left on the graves of the deceased as alms for the dead. Eventually, the custom of souling developed, in which children would go door to door offering to pray for the souls of the household's defunct family and would eat the soul cakes in the place of their departed. It takes very little time to see that this is the custom from which trick-or-treating developed.
Thus, we see that all of the significant Hallowe'en practices originate from mediaeval Catholic piety: dressing up comes from the veneration of the Saints and their relics; trick-or-treating originated as a way to get children to pray for the dead; jack-o-lanterns stem from a belief in the demonic and the need to ward off evil spirits. The holiday is so Catholic that the first real objections to its celebration came from early English Calvinists, who objected to it on the basis that it promoted the doctrines of Purgatory and Intercession of the Saints. Far from being a thinly camouflaged excuse to entice the innocent into venerating the Devil while giving themselves cavities, Hallowe'en is the Catholic cultural celebration par excellence.
The Unbaptizing of a Christian Holy Day
It is thoroughly untrue and ahistorical to say that Hallowe’en developed as a Christianized pagan holiday. Hallowe’en is a holiday that began as a Catholic celebration of the Saints. As time went on, mediaeval Catholic superstition and piety formed a rich celebration of the Hallowed Souls of the Triumphant in Christ and a solemn remembrance of the suffering Saints in Purgatory. Any resemblances to established pagan celebrations are either purely coincidental or so superficial that you could just as easily argue that Hallowe’en is a Christianized version of the Fourth of July.
However, one thing that is rarely if ever pointed out is that more and more recently the reverse of the tired old line is becoming true: Hallowe’en is, rather than being a Catholicized pagan holiday, very swiftly becoming a paganized Catholic holiday. For the longest time in popular consciousness, Hallowe’en has been viewed as a holiday to celebrate the evil and monstrous features of our world, ranging from movie monsters like Dracula to actual demon-possessed psychopaths like Jeffrey Dahmer. Not only this but now with the rise of neopagan religions and modern witchcraft, Hallowe’en is either becoming a pseudo-holy day for Wiccans and witches the world over or is being outright replaced by modern observances of Samhain. What once was an offensively papist holiday is being offensively co-opted by heathens.
This is a major call to arms for the faithful: rather than abandon our hallowed days to be bastardized by the forces and conduits of evil, we need to become more unabashed in our celebration of these sacred feasts and vigils.
We must reclaim the deeply Catholic traditions associated with Hallowe'en. While it's not necessary to give out soul cakes door to door (most responsible parents wouldn't let their kids eat them anyway), you can keep some of the other traditions that are quickly becoming lost. You can fast with your family on Hallowe'en in keeping with the tradition of keeping Vigils (kids can save their trick-or-treating spoils for the solemn day that follows). You can dress your kids up as Saints* and Angels and other Hallowed men and women of God. You can go to Mass (if you live near a Latin Mass, you can even attend a traditional Hallowmas Vigil Mass) and pray for the souls of the departed and join in prayer with the communion of Saints. You can carve religious iconography like crosses and Chi Rho's into pumpkins instead of mean and scary faces. None of this is to say that all of the secular practices are bad in and of themselves, but they all take their root in the profanation of a Catholic holiday, and we should strive to re-consecrate it.
Happy Hallowe'en!
From its origins to its traditional practices and those practices' developments and evolution, Hallowe'en is an obnoxiously, aggressively, and unabashedly Catholic holiday. It so oozes with popery that you can almost smell the lingering frankincense and hear the distant sound of iron church bells ringing while little old ladies say the Rosary whenever and wherever the word is uttered.
As we face down a culture that aims to cast off from itself the freedom of Christianity for the chains and shackles of Neopaganism, we must not give in to their attempts to unbaptize Hallowe'en and bring it into apostasy. We must instead revive the ancient Catholic customs surrounding this day, reconvert the holiday, and show forth the light of Christ through the joyful celebration of those who die in Him.
Have a blessed and penitential Hallowe'en, a happy and joyous Hallowmas, and a penitent and solemn All Souls' Day!
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*On a personal level, I have no moral objections to dressing children up as beloved cartoon characters, as figures from literature, folklore and history, and in other nonreligious costumes. However, it is definitely better and more noble, especially as our celebrations come under attack, to celebrate the Hallowed men and women for whom the day is named and whom shall be our strength in the fight to reclaim our Christian heritage and culture.
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