Culture Talk

Where Halloween actually comes from (short version)

Since Halloween is next week: the roots are usually traced to Samhain, a Celtic festival in Ireland and Scotland marking the end of harvest, when the boundary with the dead was thought to be thin. The church later placed All Saints' and All Souls' days around the same time. The jack-o'-lantern started with carved turnips in Ireland, and pumpkins took over in North America because they're bigger and easier to carve.

So in a way, what many people see as an American holiday is a migrant tradition that came back to Europe. Source: my religion and media seminar, and a lot of late reading.