Scary Halloween Masks

The count down has begun, with only a few days to go, I think everybody is already in the mood for Halloween. Celebrated on the 31st of October, Halloween is a holiday that includes a lot of traditional activities like costume parties, trick-or-treating, watching horror films and visiting haunted houses.

Originally known as Samhain, a pagan festival among the Celts of Ireland and Great Britain, this tradition was carried to North America by the Irish and Scottish immigrants in the 1840’s.

The custom of trick-or-treating is said to have begun with a ninth-century European custom called souling. On All Souls Day, which is celebrated on November 2nd, early Christians would walk from one village to another begging for "soul cakes," which were made up of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes a beggar received, the more prayers he would promise to say for the dead relatives of the donors. At this time, people believed that the dead remained in midpoint after death and that prayer, even if said by a stranger, would hasten a soul’s passage to heaven.

Irish folktale is responsible for the custom of Jack-o-lantern. The story reveals that there was a man named Jack, who was a known as a drunkard and a trickster, tricked Satan into climbing a tree, after which he carved an image of a cross on the tree trunk, trapping Satan there. Jack told Satan he would only let him down if he promised to never tempt him again.

When Jack died, God denied him entrance to heaven because of his evil ways. Similarly, he was denied entrance into hell because he had tricked the devil. Instead, the devil gave Jack a single ember to light his way through the frigid darkness; this ember was placed in a turnip that had been hollowed out to keep it burning longer.

Originally, the Irish did use turnips as their Jack-o-lanterns. Once they came to America and realized that pumpkins were far more plentiful there, they placed the ember into hollowed out pumpkins instead.

Scary Halloween Masks

Soon it will be time to don the mask and the costume and hit the road. I am sure you could do with some help, here are the names of some scary Halloween masks for you to choose from:

• Maggot Buffet Mask
• Scary Skull Mask
• Skinned Skull Mask
• Blasted Head Mask
• Arctic Dragon Mask
• Pickles Mask
• Freak the clown Mask
• Elegant Devil Mask
• Invisible Mask
• Evil Genie Mask