halloween

With the arrival of European immigrants to the United States of America, came the varied Halloween customs indiginous to their former homelands. However, due to the rigid Protestant beliefs which characterized early New England, celebration of Halloween in colonial times was extremely limited in that particular area of the country. Halloween festivities were much more common in Maryland and thecolonies located in the South. As the customs practiced by these varied European ethnic groups meshed with traditions employed by the native American Indians, a distinctly American version of Halloween began to emerge.
The first celebrations included "play parties," public events held to celebrate the harvest. At these gatherings, neighbors would share stories of the dead, predict each others'fortunes, sing and make merry with dancing. Colonial Halloween festivities also featured the telling of ghost stories and general mischief-making of all kinds. By the middle of the 19th Century, annual Autumn festivals were quite common, but Halloween was still not yet celebrated throughout the entire country.
During the second half of the 19th Century, America became flooded with a new wave ofimmigrants. These new arrivals...especially the millions of Irish nationals who were fleeing from the Potato Famine of 1846...helped greatly in popularizing the celebration of Halloween on a country-wide level. Taking from Irish and English traditions, Americans began to don costumes and journey from house-to-house asking for food or money (the probable forerunners of today's "trick-or-treaters").Young women held the belief that they could divine the name or appearance of their future husband by performing tricks with yarn, apple peelings or mirrors.
By the late 1800s, the focus of American Halloween celebrations had shifted to community and neighborly "get-togethers," becoming much less concerned with ghosts, pranks and witchcraft. At the turn of the 20th Century, Halloween parties forboth children and adults were the most common way to celebrate the day. These parties featured the playing of games, indulging in the foods of the season and the wearing of festive costumes. Parents were encouraged by the press and community leaders to remove anything "frightening" or "grotesque" from the celebration of Halloween. Due to these efforts, Halloween rapdily lost the vast majority of itssuperstitious and religious overtones during this period.
With the arrival of the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween had become a secular but community-centered holiday which included parades and town-wide parties as the featured entertainment. Despite the efforts of many schools and communities at this time, a wide rash of vandalism and acts of destruction began to plague the celebrations in manycommunities. It was not uncommon for outhouses to be tipped over (whether occupied at the time or not) and the tipping over of cows in rural areas was considered to be a clever prank indeed. In some towns, the night prior to Halloween was known as Gate Night and that evening's activities included switching gates among neighborhood fences.
By the 1950s however, most town leaders had successfully limitedsuch behavior and Halloween had evolved into a holiday which was directed mainly toward the young people. With the 1950s "baby-boomer" generation, parties moved from town civic centers into the classroom or home, where they could be more easily accommodated. Between 1920 and 1950, the centuries-old practice of "trick-or-treating" was also revived. This provided a relatively inexpensive way for anentire community to share in the Halloween celebrations. In theory, families could also prevent tricks being played on them by providing the neighborhood children with small treats. Thus, a new American tradition was born and continues to grow. In recent years, this practice has been put to even better use since some children collect pennies for UNICEF (United Nations International Childrens...