Halloween used to be something that we'd see in movies and tv shows from the USA, but not something that we really celebrated in the UK. In recent years it's become more and more popular and now there are huge ranges of fancy dress costumes and Halloween decorations to suit everyone's tastes and pocket. Children start planning what they're going to wear and how many sweets they're going to collect weeks in advance.
The history of modern Halloween comes partly from the Christian celebration of All Saints Eve, also known as All Hallows Eve, which takes place on 31st October. Hallows Evening eventually became Hallowe'en which is how the name we know came to be. It's a day when martyrs and saints (known as hallows) would be remembered and the idea was to confront the power of death. Halloween is also based partly on the ancient Celtic festival of Samhaim (pronounced "sah-win"). The ancient people that celebrated Samhaim believed that on 31st October the boundaries between the world of the living and the world of the dead would overlap and the dead would come back to life and wreak havoc. One of the things they did was to build bonfires to frighten away the dead, which would attract bats and insects which then became some of the holiday's traditional symbols and the bonfires have since been replaced by candles used to light up carved pumpkins. The popular tradition of wearing masks and fancy dress costumes comes from the Celts disguising themselves so that the ghosts of the dead would not recognise the living and leave them alone.
One of the most traditional ways of celebrating Halloween is for children to go Trick or Treating. The origins of this go back several hundred years and combine the idea of Mischief Night, when children would play practical jokes on their neighbours, such as taking hinges off gates or changing shop signs; and an old European custom called Souling, whereby beggars going door to door would be given Soul Cake (a bit like a hot cross bun) in exchange for prayers for a donor's dead relatives. Today this has become a tradition whereby children in fancy dress go door to door calling out "trick or treat" in the hopes of being given sweets and chocolates.
