Is Halloween Your Favorite Holiday? You're Not Alone!

Halloween used to be a minor holiday, geared mainly toward children who celebrated it with elementary school parties, construction paper pumpkins and witches, and an evening of trick-or-treating in costume through the neighborhood. But amazingly, within the past decade many adults have latched onto the holiday. Grown-ups go all out decorating their front yards with tombstones, hanging witches, ghosts, and other scary objects, throw Halloween costume parties, and decorate their workplaces with spooky décor. A lot of adults, when asked about their favorite holiday, don't claim Thanksgiving or Christmas, but Halloween.

Halloween dates back to pre-Christian Celtic Britain and Ireland, when pagans celebrating an earth-based religion acknowledged a time when, according to their belief, the spirit world and the ordinary physical world intersected. Indeed, the holiday takes place at a really spooky time of year-late October, when days are shorter and nights longer and seemingly darker, when nocturnal animals furtively prepare for the long winter hibernation, and when trees bare of leaves scrape their bony fingers across the night sky. It's easy to believe in ghosts and witches and other fantastical beings this time of year.

As Christians spread their own religion throughout the British Isles and other parts of Europe, they adapted pagan holidays to their own purposes. Winter solstice became Christmas, spring fertility rites became Easter-and Samhain became Halloween, or All Hallow's Eve, a churchly nod to pagan spirits allowed to roam free the night before All Saint's Day, which is celebrated on November 1 each year.

So if you enjoy Halloween, by all means celebrate it, with the knowledge that it has the official sanction of the Church. If on the other hand, the holiday spooks you, there's a prayer included in the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer especially for you: "From ghoulies and ghosties, and long-leggity beasties, and things that go bump in the night, good Lord deliver us!"