Halloween: a Christian Tradition

Has it occurred to you, why is that some people prefer a scary costume and people chanting scary groans during the time of Halloween? Why do people spend significant amount of money on this day? Where did it all begin? 

Halloween dates back to ancient Celtic period who lived 2000 years ago in the surrounding area of Ireland, the United Kingdom, and northern France. The Celtic festival was called Samhain and was celebrated to mark the new year on November 1. This marked the end of bright summer and harvest season and beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time associated with death. Celts believed that the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred just before their new year. On the October 31, the Celts celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghost of the dead returned to earth. 

To commemorate the event, the Celts built huge bonfires and burn the crops and sacrificed animals. People dressed typically as animals and attempted to tell the fortune of each other who are awaiting them long winter. Therefore, we can trace back the origins of Halloween to the Celts. 

On May 13, 609 A.D., Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome in honor of all Christian martyrs, and the Catholic feast of All Martyrs Day was established in the Western church. Pope Gregory III (731–741) later expanded the festival to include all saints as well as all martyrs, and moved the observance from May 13 to November 1. By the 9th century the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands, where it gradually blended with and supplanted the older Celtic rites. In 1000 A.D., the church would make November 2 All Souls’ Day, a day to honor the dead. It is widely believed today that the church was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, but church-sanctioned holiday. All Souls Day was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels and devils. The All Saints Day celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints’ Day) and the night before it, the traditional night of Samhain in the Celtic religion, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Irish immigrants make this festival popular in America. Taking from Irish and English traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to house asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became today’s “trick-or-treat” tradition. 

The American Halloween tradition of “trick-or-treating” probably dates back to the early All Souls’ Day parades in England. During the festivities, poor citizens would beg for food and families would give them pastries called “soul cakes” in return for their promise to pray for the family’s dead relatives. The distribution of soul cakes was encouraged by the church as a way to replace the ancient practice of leaving food and wine for roaming spirits. 

Halloween dressing in costume has European and Celtic origins. People were anxious and frightened of the long dark nights and cold winter. People dressed as ghosts in order to disguise from the ghosts visiting the earth.  On Halloween, to keep ghosts away from their houses, people would place bowls of food outside their homes to appease the ghosts and prevent them from attempting to enter.

Halloween needs to understood properly in order not to slide into superstition or public disorder. Its origins show us that this festival is celebrated for a reason and reason being cold and long winter nights. It has its significance to Christianity where in the people dressed as saints on all Saints Day to remember the holiness of the persons. Let us not be paranoid or overwhelm at Halloween festivities. Let us make this celebration to benefit someone as the Europeans did by giving "soul cake" to the poor. 

In sickness and in health… Together we become saints

There are a few people who make impressions in our lives and a few who  make a long lasting impressions, one such model couple who

made a deep impression in my life are the parents of St. Therese of Lisieux. Their commitment, love, complementarity, harmony, pragmatic faith and endurance in suffering are the key virtues that we can draw our inspiration. Saints Louis and Zelie Martin are the first married couple to ever be canonized together.

The couple had nine children, four of whom died in infancy. The remaining five, all girls, became nuns. The youngest, Therese, died of tuberculosis aged 24 in 1897 and was canonized in 1925.

Pope Francis praised the couples’ humble attitude towards others, which is evident in the way that they practiced service within the family, “creating day by day an environment of faith and love which nurtured the vocations of their daughters, among whom was Saint Therese of the Child Jesus.”

I had the privilege of interviewing a few couples for Catholic Television in view of Synod on family which is currently underway in the Vatican. Every couple expressed that marriage has to be based on love; a covenantal love that couples profess in the Sacrament of Marriage.

It is marvellous timing that Louis and Zelie are canonized during the Synod on the Family. It is also the reminder of the Second Vatican Council’s ‘universal call to holiness’, that is, the fact that married men and women, including singly men and women are just as holy as bishops, priests, sisters and brothers.

Louis and Zelie Martin had circuitous journey to marriage and family life. Louis wanted to be a priest and Zelie a woman religious. A number of circumstances prevented both of them from those paths, and this was a great disappointment to both of them. But in time, they found one another and married.

Louis and Zelie and their children were a family of prayer. They prayed every night before the statue of the Virgin of the Smile. Prayer was the key to their family life, which helped St. Therese to be the spiritual guru and a spiritual giant. Their four children out of nine died in infancy, the remaining five, all girls, became nuns. Zelie says of the deaths of her children, ‘when I closed the eyes of my dear children and prepared them for burial, I was indeed grief-stricken, but, thanks to God’s grace, I have always been resigned to His will. I do not regret the pains and sacrifices I underwent for them.”

This couple had a magnificent trust in God even in the situation of uncertainty and grief. Zelie writes about her faith in God, “When I think of what this good God, in whom I have put all my trust, and into whose hands I have resigned the care of my affairs, has done for me and for my husband, I cannot doubt that his Divine Providence watches over his children with a special care.” In their love for each other, in raising a large family with all its attendant worries and responsibilities, and in their love of God, shown when they were tried as models for any married man or woman living today. They are inspiration to many of our couples who grow through hardships of life; the tragedy of a young mother dying of cancer and leaving a large family, and the heartbreak of a dearly loved member of the family being in a mental institution, and the problem of caring for a sick and elderly relative.

I would like to conclude with the words of St. Therese about her parents, “God gave me a mother and father more worthy of heaven than of earth.”