All Hallows' Eve

All Hallows' Eve, "Halloween", is the vigil of All Saints (All Hallows), the night of 31 October before the feast of 1 November, and forms the opening of the Christian triduum of the dead: Halloween, All Saints, and All Souls, three days on which the church remembers the holy dead and prays for all the departed. In Christian terms the eve's customs of light and remembrance belong to that commemoration, and in parts of the Catholic world the night is kept with prayer at graves.

The popular claim that Halloween simply is the Celtic festival of Samhain rechristened is more confidently asserted than the evidence allows. Samhain, the Gaelic feast at the start of winter, was indeed a time associated with the boundary between the living and the dead, and some Halloween folklore plausibly draws on it; but the fixing of All Saints to 1 November has its own documented Roman and Frankish history, and much of what is now taken as ancient, from trick-or-treat to the carved jack-o'-lantern, is modern and largely North American, developed among Irish and Scottish immigrant communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The honest account is a layered one: a Christian vigil, a possible Celtic substratum, and a heavily commercialised modern holiday, not a single pagan survival.

A number of conservative Protestant and some Catholic communities in the United States decline to participate in Halloween's popular customs at all, regarding trick-or-treating, costumes and related activities as either spiritually risky given the holiday's association, however historically contested, with the occult and the dead, or simply as an unhelpful distraction from the more sombre and prayerful triduum of the dead this entry's first article describes, and many such churches instead organise alternative events on the same night or nearby, commonly called trunk-or-treat or harvest festival gatherings, held in church parking lots or halls and offering candy, games and costumes stripped of any imagery the organisers consider objectionable.

These alternative events have become widespread enough in American evangelical church culture to constitute their own distinct, recognisable form of the holiday, run alongside rather than replacing the mainstream commercial Halloween that has grown into one of the largest annual consumer spending occasions in the United States, so that a single autumn night now supports several parallel, largely separate observances, from purely secular trick-or-treating to church-run alternative festivals to the older Catholic vigil of prayer for the dead, each largely invisible to participants in the others.