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Uncanny Archaeology of Halloween

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Vlad the Impaler
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« on: October 30, 2009, 02:01:41 am »

One theory on the origins of guising and dressing as ghosts may be in the notion that the dead are returning on this night and the change of appearance may protect the human from being recognized by the returning spirits of the dead. The sense of things being topsy-turvy and inverted may have given rise to people having fun and using an opportunity to change their appearance into something they are not ordinarily. Today, children dress up in various different costumes, some inspired by the latest films, characters from fantasy stories, and other areas of popular culture. Children trick-or-treat in Ireland nowadays but this tradition may have come back to Ireland from America. In pre-modern Ireland, it was known that Samhain was a time when people could play practical jokes and hoaxes, being a liminal time when such activity would be acceptable, but the custom of going door-to-door threatening to play pranks if candy and other treats are not received seems to be a later development. There seem to be many more organized children's Halloween parties these days and a fear of allowing small children out at night might be a factor in this. Irish society, as with society generally, has changed in major ways since the time of small communities where locals knew each other's children and would look out for them, into a very diversified and in many ways more dangerous society where children need to be accompanied by adults (thus lessoning the leeway to do tricks on niggardly people who don't deliver the goods!). The private Halloween parties of today tend to move towards fancy dress. We can still see similarities in the games played at Halloween and those of an older time--snap-apple, bobbing for apples, and dares are still very prominent at parties.
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