Why Do We Dress Up on Halloween?
True, odd moments from history, told short and checked against at least two sources.
The story
(18) Why do we dress up on Halloween? One story says it was to hide from ghosts. Historians disagree. (26) The popular story starts with Samhain, an old Irish festival on October thirty-first, when spirits supposedly roamed. Folks wore disguises so the dead wouldn't know them. (23) But historian Lisa Bitel says almost no evidence survives of what the ancient Irish actually did that night. Nineteenth-century folklorists built that link.
(24) What's on record starts in the 1500s: souling, singing at doors for soul cakes, and guising, going door to door in disguise for food. (35) One custom was stranger. In 1853, William Hackett described County Cork youths blowing cow horns behind a figure in a white sheet with a mare's head. The White Mare, collecting milk and butter.
(17) Immigrants brought these customs to America, and by 1937, Ben Cooper was selling boxed costumes from Brooklyn. (22) What really happened? Nobody knows if costumes first hid us from ghosts. But dressing up to knock on doors is on record.
Sources
- nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/the-history-of-trick-or-treating-and-how-
- blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/2021/10/the-origins-of-halloween-traditions/
- britannica.com/topic/Halloween
- theconversation.com/the-ancient-irish-get-far-too-much-credit-for-halloween-2398
- docslib.org/doc/1788653/5-trick-or-treat-pre-texts-and-contexts
- reed-ne.webspace.durham.ac.uk/?page_id=3908
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guising
- history.co.uk/articles/souling-the-forgotten-halloween-tradition