The word ‘Hallow’ refers to Holy and ‘een’ is the short form of evening. On October 31, the ancient Celtic tribes of Scotland, Wales and Ireland celebrated the celebrated the festival of Samhain, the lord of the dead. They believed that the souls of the dead would come back to mingle with the living on this day. In order to ward off evil spirits, they lit up bonfires and wore masks. They initially carved turnips and placed lighted candles to scare the evil spirits. These are now replaced by carved out pumpkins as these are easily available during the autumn in North America and can be easily carved than turnips!

On Halloween day, the children go door to door crying ‘trick or treat’, wearing masks or costumes to scare others. They sometimes perform songs or horror stories. ‘Trick’ refers to threats of mischief on the house owners or their properties if no treats are given to them. The treats include apple candies, Candy Corn, Barmbrack or fruit cake.

Other Halloween foods include:

1.  Roasted sweet corn
2.  Popcorn
3.  Roasted pumpkin seeds
4.  Pumpkin pie or bread
5.  Novelty candy shaped like skulls, pumpkins, bats and worms
6.  A small bags of potato chips
7.  Chocolates, caramels and gum
8.  Pumpkin and apple pie ice cream

Two main colours associated with Halloween are Orange and Black.

Halloween imagery involves death, evil, monsters. Everywhere there will be scary characters like the Devils, vampires, werewolves, zombies, mummies, skeletons, goblins, spiders, pirates, bats, owls, vultures and black cats and witches.

The houses are decorated with Halloween symbols like the scarecrows, corn husks, carved pumpkins with lighted candles in it, called the ‘Jack-o-lantern’ to give an eerie feeling. According to the Irish legend, Jack was a greedy, stingy old farmer who tricked the devil into climbing a tree and trapped him there by carving a cross on the tree. The devil in turn cursed him to wander at nights with just a candle light.

Decorate your house with home made decorations. Images of bats, webs, spiders and crows really give haunted look. Scarecrows and Pumpkins neatly carved out to give funny and scary faces and lighted with a candle can add to the spooky atmosphere. The lighting must be dim with scary back ground music.

Halloween games can be head-started with a costume parade. You can dress to be like any scary character such as a witch, a black cat or even an extra- terrestrial one.

Popular Boys Costumes for Halloween

The popular ones now are those from Hollywood movies such as

• Captain Jack Sparrow, a typical pirate costume
• Ninja fighter
• Air force Child
• Jungle Fighter
• Soldier
• Diego

etc are for boys.

Popular Girls Costumes for Halloween

Girls choose for

• Never-land fairies
• Queen Costumes
• Dora
• Barbie
• Red Riding Hood
• Witches
• Playful kitties.

Halloween Games

These can be accompanied by Halloween Games like

• Zombie-tag: masked and blindfolded, the zombie with his or her hands stretched out must zero-in on his victim, who would be the next zombie.
• Apple bobbing: is a popular Halloween game where apples float in a basin of water and the participants must use their teeth alone to remove the apples from the basin.
• Dunking: the participant has to kneel on a chair, holding a fork between the teeth and try to dip the fork into the apple.

The menus can have scary names in them.

1. Worms on a bun: Cut hot dogs into worm like strips and microwave them. These are placed on the buns with a touch of ketchup.
2. Spicy bat wings: These are actually spiced chicken or Buffalo wings barbequed.
3. Scary eyes: eggs hard boiled, cut lengthwise in the shape of an eye; yolk replaced by whipped cream and olives.

Walt DisneyPark organizes Halloween Party during the months of October and November in their resort at Florida and Paris. There is a Halloween parade by the Headless horsemen from the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. These are followed by parades of Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Winnie the Pooh and friends in Halloween costumes. Stage shows where you can meet and greet the villains from Disney movies titled “The Disney Villains Mix and Mingle”. Fireworks are again a piece of attraction for the spectators.

Halloween Day is celebrated all over the world and has thus become a secular celebration, though they have their roots from Pagans and Christian faiths.

A cat's green eyes
in midnight gloom
fly with the witch
on her ragged broom

Ghosts and shadow people
evade our sight.
None may not see what they might.
We begin our door to door Halloween flight.
Not knowing our immediate plight
we bravely approach your door and RING……

TRICK OR TREAT!! We say with a strong and mighty grin.
Candy and little toys we hope to gain
from this daring plan imagined in these little brains.
BOOOOO!! We are greeted as a scary hand
extends to our goodie sacks.
The lights go black, we stagger back!!
Screams explode, others jump!!
Dogs howl and unfriendly things give us a bump.

It’s Halloween! The voice screams as
we dump out our goodie sacks and run.

So keep the goodies and
BOOOOOOOOO! To you!