festivals5

Harvest Festivals

Harvest festivals come at a time of year when the last warmth of Indian summer is gone, and bleak winds and gray skies begin to appear. It s the time of year when barns are made snug, the last of the apples and vegetables are stored away in bins and people sit in front of a roaring fire to relax from their long summer's work. In short, it is a rejoicing over earth's gifts. The custom of holding a festival at harvesttime goes back over two thousand years. The last day of the year on the old pagan calendar, October 31, served the triple purpose of bidding goodby to summer, welcoming winter and remembering the dead. The Irish built tremendous bonfires on hilltops to offer encouragement to the waning sun and to provide a warm welcome for visiting sprites and ghosts that walked about in the night. People of British Isles had the quaint custom of tossing objects, such as stones, vegetables and nuts, into a bonfire to frighten away any "spooks" that might be near. These symbolic sacrifices were also fortunetelling props, still widely used at Halloween parties today. If a pebble a man flung into the fire at night was no longer visible the following morning, people clucked sympathetically, believing the man wouldn't survive another year. If the nuts tossed by young lovers exploded in the flames, their would be a quarrelsome marriage, etc.
More fearful of spooks than spouses, folks began hollowing out turnips and pumpkins and placing lighted candles inside to scare evil spirits from the house. Why was the result called a "jack-o'-lantern"? Irish legend says that a man named Jack, notorious for his drunken and niggardly ways, tricked the devil into climbing up a tree. Quickly carving a cross into the tree's trunk, Jack trapped Satan until he swore he'd never again tempt Jack to sin. Upon his death, Jack found himself barred from the conforts of heaven for his repeated sinning, and also refused entrance to the heat of hell from an unforgiving Satan. Condemned to wander in frigid darkness until Judgement Day, he implored the devil for burning embers to light his way. Though Satan had embers in surplus, he allotted Jack a single coal that would last an agonizingly short time. Putting the ember into a turnip he had chewed hollow, he formed Jack's lantern. It was the Irish, too, who initiated the "trick or treat" system hundreds of years ago. Groups of Irish farmers would go from house to house soliciting food for the village Halloween festivities in the name of no less a personage than Muck Olla (ancient god of Irish clergy). Prosperity was promised to cheerful givers and threats made against tightfisted donors. It was the custom for English children to dress up in each other's clothes (boys donning girls' outfits and vice versa) and, wearing masks, to go begging from door to door for "soul cakes".

Surprisingly, Halloween was scarcely observed in the US until the last half of the 19th century. It is thought the large-scale Irish immigration had much to do with the popularizing of the holiday. Rather than threaten vengeance for youtful Halloween pranks, more and more communities and neighborhoods have been forestalling them with organized treasure hunts, block parties and other forms of entertainment.

To children, Halloween has
paint on skeletons, bats crowded over a cauldron above all, "wails of the ban- They love to put their hands (horrible) objects such as a of feathers, etc., without rous jack-o'-lanterns with stories too! All this, we
night a year in which a child fantasy and mystery. Even in
festival for witches, goblins,
bonfires and playing devilish
reasons for dressing up

always meant phosphorescent dangling from the ceiling, witches mumbling black magic spells and shee" coming out of the darkness! under a sheet and hold various cold oyster, a piece of fur, a bunch squirming. Added to this are nume- eerie lights and faces and ghost wouldn't change--it is the one experiences the emotions of fear,
ancient times, Halloween was a
and ghosts, as well as for lighting
pranks. What has changed over the
ghoulishy, lighting fires, and acting

mischievous. Now these things are done for fun--and by children; in the past, they were done in deathly earnest--and by adults.
Named "All Hallows Eve", the festival was first celebrated by the ancient Celts in Ireland in the fifth century B.C. On the night of October 31, then the official end of summer, Celtic households extinguished the fires on their hearts to deliberately make their homes cold and undesirable to disembodied spirits. The Celts believed that on October 31, all persons who had died in the previous year assembled to choose the body of the person or aninal they

would inhabit for the next twelve months, before they could pass peacefully into the afterlife. To frighten roving souls, Celtic family members dressed themselves as demons, hobgoblins, and witches. The Romans adopted Celtic Halloween practices, but in A.D. 61 they outlawed human sacrifice, substituting the Egyptian custom of effigies (called ushabti by the Egyptians, who buried scores of statuettes with a pharaoh in place of his living attendants, once entombed with their king). In time, as belief in spirit possession waned, the dire portents of many Halloween practices lightened to ritualized amusement. Irish immigrants fleeing their country's potato famine in the 1840s brought to America with them the Halloween customs of costume and mischief. The Irish also brought with them a custom that New England agriculture forced them to modify. Whereas the Pilgrims had made the edible part of the pumpkin a hallmark of Thanksgiving, the Irish made the outer shell synonymous with Halloween.

Halloween