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Halloween is an annual celebration held on the night of October 31, especially by
children dressing in costumes and going door-to-door collecting sweets, fruit, and
other treats. Over and above this trick-or-treating, the Halloween comes with many
other traditional activities. Among these are costume parties, watching horror films,
visiting "haunted" houses as well as familiar autumn activities such as hayrides,
some of these even "haunted". Halloween is commonly celebrated in the United States,
Canada, the UK, Ireland, and it is now becoming popular even in Australia, New Zealand
and the Philippines. Some Western European countries like Belgium, France and Spain
have also recently started celebrating Halloween.
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Story and history
Many believe that at the time of Halloween, spirits can make contact with the physical
world and magic becomes most potent. According to a story, on the day of Halloween,
the spirits of all those who
had died the preceding year would return to look for
living bodies they could possess for the next year. As the living persons would
never like to be possessed, they would put out the fires in their homes, to make
them uncomfortable and undesirable for the spirits. They would then move about in
all sorts of ghoulish dresses and
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noisily parade around the neighborhood to scare
away the spirits.
A shortened form of All-hallow-even, because it is the evening of or before “All
Hallows Day,” Halloween was originally a pagan festival among the Celts of Ireland
and Great Britain. Later different versions of the tradition were carried to North America by Irish, Scots, Welsh and other immigrants in the 19th century. In the
West, Halloween is mostly accepted as a part of American pop culture in the late 20th century.
Symbols and colors
Halloween art involves death, magic and mythical monsters. So familiar Halloween
characters include ghosts, ghouls, witches, vampires, bats, owls, crows, vultures,
haunted houses,
pumpkin men, black cats, spiders, goblins, zombies, mummies, skeletons,
werewolves, and demons. Although black and orange are the traditional colors of
Halloween, purple, green, and red are also used these days.
Trick-or-treating
In the United States, the main Halloween event is trick-or-treating, in which children
dress up in costume disguises and go door-to-door in their neighborhood, ringing
each doorbell and yelling "trick or treat!" The occupants of the house (often themselves
dressed in frightening costumes) will then hand out things like small candies or
miniature chocolate bars. This event takes different forms in different countries.
Games and foods
A common Halloween game is bobbing for apples, in which apples float in
a tub or a large basin of water; the participants must use their teeth to remove
an apple from the basin. Another interesting game involves hanging up treacle or
syrup-coated scones by strings; one must eat them without using hands while they
remain attached to the string.
Coming at the end of the annual apple harvest, candy apples were a common treat
at Halloween. The practice, however, waned following rumors that some individuals
were embedding items like pins and razor blades in the apples that they would pass
out to children. Other foods associated with Halloween are candy corn, bonfire toffee,
toffee apple, hot apple cider, roasted or popped corn, roasted pumpkin seeds, pumpkin
pie and pumpkin bread etc.
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