This post is about Halloween or
Hallowe'en, which is also known as All Hallows' Eve. Halloween is a
feast that falls on the 31st October each year. It is celebrated in
many countries around the world. It is also known is Hungary, the country where I live, but anyway I have never celebrated Halloween and
didn't know much about it. There were only some pictures in my head,
such as people in costumes, carved pumpkins and children knocking on
doors in the neighborhood, screaming: “Trick or Treat”.
For this post I did some research on
the Internet and I checked out the following links:
These videos and articles are really
interesting and now I know much more about Halloween than before. I
didn know that this tradition has it's origin in a
2000 years old Celtic festival, called Samhain. My favourite article is the one about the Irish folktale of “Stingy
Jack”, a man who tricked the Devil. This legend tries to explain
the origin of the carved “Jack O'Lanterns”. This folktale and
several customs were brought to America by Irish immigrants but by the years this feast has become extremely commercial.
Looking at the statistics above, I noticed that Americans spent nearly 7 billion Dollars on Halloween in 2011, but for me the most shocking was that in the same year 15% of the people who
were interviewed planned to dress their pets in costumes. In my
opinion, nowadays it is a funny social-event on which people spend a
lot of money.
