Trick or Treat

Written by United Planet Team Member Allie

UP Team 2008

This October 31st most Americans will be celebrating Halloween. Originally Halloween or All Hallows Eve was a Celtic tradition that celebrated the beginning of fall. The Celts also considered this time a festival of the dead. They would honor the dead, and welcome their ancestors back into their homes. Young men would dress as ghosts or bad spirits that would visit earth and harm the living. They built bonfires to ward off the bad spirits and slaughter livestock for the coming winter; the bones from the animals were burned as part of the cleansing process.

Team Member Li

Americans today celebrate Halloween in many different ways. Halloween is a darker holiday associated with mischief, the undead and the devil. Often fake skeletons, zombies, bats, vampires, and dismembered body parts are displayed in store windows and outside people’s homes. Many families carve pumpkins into faces to create a “jack-o-lantern” to display outside their homes. A jack-o-lantern is created by cutting into the top of the pumpkin and removing the pulp from the pumpkin. You then carve a face on one side of the pumpkin, place a candle on the inside, and put the top back on.

Another tradition of Halloween is the Haunted House. Haunted Houses can become quite elaborate and are intended to make you feel as if you are in the middle of a horror movie that can make you cry from fear. Some cities sponsor haunted houses in closed prisons or psychiatric hospitals. A lot of the symbols used in the modern celebrations of Halloween has been heavily influenced by the Gothic period in literature, especially by books such as Frankenstein and Dracula.

Team Member Alyssa

On Halloween night American children dress in costumes and go “trick or treating” which is now one of the main traditions of Halloween. Costumes in the past have ranged from ghosts to monsters and other scary images, but now also include princesses, cowboys and famous television characters. Children go around their neighbor’s homes asking for candy and other treats. When neighbors answer their front door children yell trick or treat, implying that if they do not receive candy they will cause harm to their neighbor or their home, although more often than not it will be a treat.

Of the festivities, UP Team Member Anne Louise says, “We do not really celebrate halloween in France, so seeing decorated pumkins in front of all the porches here will be a good memory of mine. There is something magical in all the excitement we can feel during Halloween preparation time!”

Growing up in Maryland, UP Executive Director Dave remembers “Mischief Night“, when teenagers play pranks on neighbors the night before Halloween. Neighbors would wake up to an assortment of things such as toilet paper in their trees and soap on their car windows.

Team Member Theresa

However you deciede to celebrate, the team at United Planet wishes you a Happy Halloween! And if you have extra candy it can always be shipped to our office at 11 Arlington Place, in Boston. I hear that the members of our Quest Team are excellent “candy testers.”