Dracula – Myth and reality

Halloween – as a farytale
At first side, it seems there is no pleasure to be around witches, demons or vampires, but Halloween is a holyday that celebrates the fact that the science fiction world comes into the real world.
On Halloween you can dance with vampires, demons, fairies, angels, cowboys, ghosts, snowball men. You can eat the traditional dinner of sweets, at the light of the candles made from pumpkins.

Halloween – a little bit of history and meanings
Even if Halloween is a pagan celebration, it has been accepted by the church, because the people continued practicing it during time.

The celts, that lived 2000 years ago, in the area that is now called Ireland, United Kingdom, and north of France, were celebrating the new year on the 1st November .That day was the end of the summer and c the rops and the beginning of winter, asssociated with death many times. The celts believed that in the night before the new year the fine line between the dead people’s world and the living world is broken and that the ghosts of the deceased come back to hunt the earth, making problems and the crops. Because of that in the night of 31 of October they celebrated Samhain, a festival where they built shrines, where they brought animals to sacrifiy and crops to put.

During the celebration day they worn leather costumes or clothes made out of animal heads.When the celebration day was over, they used fire tfrom the altar shrines, in order to fire up the early fires that were put off just a few hours early. Their purpose was to protect them for the winter. Probably from here came later the ideea of the pumpkins turned into candles.

After the roman conquest, the celtic SAMHAIN was combined with two roman celebrations: Feralia, a day at the end of october, in which the romans commemmorated their deads and the festival that honoured Pomona, the goddess of fruits and trees.

In the VIIth century, the Christian influence reached celtic lands. Pope Banifaciu the IV th established the day of 1st november to be dedicated to commemmorate the saints and martirs: „The saints day”. It is a celebration that is similar to the celtic one, but established by the church.

Untill the thirties, in USA, the Haloween brought by the enghlish colonists was an old celebrations, focused on the community, with parades and parties all over the cities. During these times appeared the tradition „trick or treat”, that dated probably from the the celebrations of the Saints Day in England. During festivities, the poor people asked for food and the other people offered them pies called „soulpies” in exchange for their promise to pray for the souls of the deads in their families.