The spookiest day of the year is quickly approaching, and this means fun for people of all ages. For kids, it means dressing up, trick-or-treating, and trading candy at lunch the next day. For college students, it can mean a night to dress up (or dress down) and get tanked with friends.

No matter how you swing it, a lot of us do not know the actual history behind the day we know as Halloween.

“I’ve heard a lot of different things,” health science major Erica Westphal said. “I know it is All Hallows Eve because the next day is All Saints’ Day.”

Westphal is pretty close, because All Hallows Eve is just one of a few different festivals and celebrations that are linked to Halloween.

Liam Murphy, Sacramento State anthropology professor, said that Halloween as we know it in the United States stems from a mixture of traditions.

One of the traditions related to Halloween is the Celtic harvest festival of Samhain, which Murphy said is a mostly Irish festival. Samhain is a festival that recognized the change between summer and winter, and took place around the time that Halloween does today.

Sac State history professor Candace Gregory said that Samhain was a night that the Celts believed that ghosts walked around, and that the dead were more active this night than any other.

“This was a good thing for the Druids, who saw this as the best night to commune with the spirits for prophecy and secret, magical knowledge,” Gregory said.

She said that this was because the Druids believed the dead knew more about the future and secret knowledge.

She also said that bonfires were a big part of the festival, and that Samhain was very focused on death.

There were a few rituals that took place during Samhain and their purposes were to fend off the evil spirits that threatened not only the people, but the crops as well.

“One ritual involved throwing stones, one per person, into a bonfire,” Gregory said. “The next morning, if any stones were missing from the ashes, that foretold death.”

In the book “Halloween: An American Holiday, and American History,” Lesley Pratt Bannatyne wrote that there were different rituals depending on where Samhain was being celebrated.

The Celts would pray to make sure that the sun would stick around during the winter, and Scottish farmers marched deosil (clockwise) with lit torches around their fields to “ward off witches and bring fertility to the fields.”

Witches may not have as much to do with Halloween as some would think. Murphy said that witchcraft has little to do with Halloween for several reasons.

Murphy said that the idea of the witch as we know it today stems from the imaginations of medieval people, where the image of a hooked-nose, cloaked and cackling creature comes from.

One might be curious by now where costumes and walking door-to-door for candy comes in to Halloween’s history. There is one tradition that relates to the dressing up in costume aspect of our modern Halloween, and that was called mummery which comes from medieval Great Britain and Ireland.

“At various ritual events, mummers would be an important type of entertainment and festiveness,” Murphy said. “Although the aspect of this that matters for Halloween has to do with the widespread practice of going door-to-door dressed in costumes on Christmas Eve.”

The mummers would ask for food and drink when they went door-to-door, which is similar to what we know as trick-or-treating, but Murphy added that this is similar to Christmas caroling too.

Another day related to Halloween is All Hallows Day, which Murphy said is a Roman Catholic feast that was preceded by Hallows Eve. He added that All Hallows Day (also known as All Saints’ Day) and Hallows Eve would have been celebrated on the same day, because the medieval church, in that day, believed a new day began at sunset.

Bannatyne wrote that Pope Boniface IV devoted this day to martyred saints.

She also wrote that the people were taught to bake “soul cakes,” which were little pastries that were handed out to the poor. In exchange for this small treat, the recipients would pray for the departed family members of the towns people. They also honored Christian saints by dressing up in costume as saints, angels and devils.

“All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day in the Catholic tradition, were attempts to take over the Celtic festival of Samhain and make them Christian,” Gregory said.

These days, while not many know about the history of Halloween, what we do know is that it is not an official holiday like some would think.

“Nobody gets it off work or anything,” Murphy said. “Halloween has been what we might be called an unofficial, prescriptive, ritual celebration since the mid-19th century.”

Halloween has become a day that is similar to a holiday. Murphy said that this is because it is celebrated on the same day every year, and the same things happen every year on Oct. 31, like dressing up and going door-to-door for candy.

Also, much like an actual holiday, Murphy said it earns retailers several billion dollars through the sales of assorted Halloween goods like candy and costumes.

“The modern children’s holiday that we usually associate with Halloween first appears only after the Second World War,” Murphy said. “It was the result of efforts made by community groups to ‘domesticate’ what had often been a dangerous and chaotic event.”

There is a great difference in the way that Halloween is celebrated now, although harvest festivals still do occur.

Erica Westphal will be dressing up as a punk rocker chick, and has a few options for Halloween night.

“I’ll be going to the Zone Ball,” she said. “Only if someone doesn’t throw a party.”

Justin Salinas, theater arts major, sees Halloween as a time for traditions, such as carving pumpkins with his family and then roasting the seeds in the oven with a little bit of garlic salt.

He also reminisced about trick-or-treating with his brother in the past, and how they would look for the most durable bag to hold the most candy.

“I think it is one of those things for the kids,” Salinas said.

Stephanie Dumm can be reached at [email protected]