Halloween

Halloween is an annual holiday observed on October 31, which commonly includes activities such as trick-or-treating, attending costume parties, carving jack-o'-lanterns, bonfires, apple bobbing, visiting haunted, playing pranks, telling scary stories, and watching horror films.

Historian Nicholas Rogers, exploring the origins of Halloween, notes that while 

some folklorists have detected its origins in the Roman feast of Pomona, the 

goddess of fruits and seeds, or in the festival of the dead called Parentalia, it is 

more typically linked to the Celtic festival of Samhain, whose original spelling 

was Samuin (pronounced sow-an or sow-in)".The name of the festival 

historically kept by the Gaels and Celts in the British Isles is derived from Old

Irish and means roughly "summer's end".

According to the Oxford Dictionary of English folk lore: "Certainly Samhain was 

a time for festive gatherings, and medieval Irish texts and later Irish, Welsh, and

Scottish folklore use it as a setting for supernatural encounters, but there is no 

evidence that it was connected with the dead in pre-Christian times, or that 

pagan religious ceremonies were held."

The Irish myths which mention Samhain were written in the 10th and 11th 

centuries by Christian monks. This is around 200 years after the Catholic 

Church inaugurated All Saints Day and at least 400 years after Ireland became 

Christian.