For years, parties celebrating Halloween have relied heavily on getting dressed up in costume. Nowadays, people who are influenced by popular culture have a wide variety of simple and complex costume options available to them. However, the origins of the Halloween costume are often lost to time as is the case with many other customs. Few people take the time to learn about and appreciate the obscure backstory of the Halloween costume. Halloween is based on the ancient Celtic celebration of Samhain. Samhain was an important aspect of the Celtic “New Year” celebrations that took place around the year 2000 in what is now Western Europe (England, Ireland, and Northern France). On November 1st, the Celtic New Year began, marking the beginning of the “dark” and cold winter.
On the evening of October 31, the eve of the Celts’ New Year, they believed that “the line between the worlds of the living and the dead gets smeared,” allowing the spirits of the dead to visit the world of the living once more.
No single theory can account for the holiday’s outfit variety. Like the celebration itself, the custom of dressing up is an amalgam of several cultural practises.
Historians have hypothesized that the Celtic holiday Samhain may have been an inspiration for the custom. Samhain, which occurs between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice, is the Celtic New Year and the beginning of the “dark season.” There was a widespread belief that “the world of the gods was made visible to mortals” during Samhain.
The ancient Celts didn’t find that reassuring because they thought their gods often tricked humans. Many festival participants dressed themselves as animals or monsters, hoping to hide from malicious spirits who may bring them disaster.
Move forward a few centuries and the modern-day tradition of dressing up and trick-or-treating has its roots in the European ritual of “mumming and guising.” Mummers were known to perform plays and songs for their neighbours in exchange for food while dressed in elaborate costumes, many of which were made from straw. Immigrants from Scotland and Ireland took the custom to North America, where it evolved into trick-or-treating.
Halloween dresses didn’t reach its full glory until the mid-1900s, though. For that, you can credit New York City entrepreneurs Ben and Nat Cooper, who launched a firm making pop culture-themed costumes at a low cost. Ben Cooper, Inc., established a niche in helping kids become the characters they adored from television and comic books, frequently obtaining merchandising rights before those figures ever became popular. The Cooper family’s ingenuity was important in making Halloween costumes commonplace.
Today, Halloween costumes are a major business. National Retail Federation predicts that Americans will spend $3.2 billion on costumes this year (of that, about half a billion will go to costuming pets). One can only speculate as to the ancient Celts’ reaction to our Halloween costumes.
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It doesn’t end with your clothes darlings. Cast a spell with spooky decorations and scary treats to make Halloween a memorable celebration for all your loved ones. Our curated selection of Halloween-themed products is meant to save you time and effort, so go ahead and stock up for the scariest holiday of the year.
