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11
shortened to
Hallowe'en
(that is, the evening before All Hallows
Day).
The practice of souling - going from door to door on or about All
Souls Day to solicit gifts of food in return for prayers for the
dead - evolved from a pagan ritual that was practiced all over
Europe, possibly as early as the 10th century. As a Christian
tradition it goes back to at least the 14th century
The tradition has altered so that it is now children, usually
dressed in disguise, who go about asking for gifts around the
beginning of November Some examples of this are from:
England, where we have requests for '
a penny for the guy
'. This
derives from the bonfire celebrations that began to celebrate the
thwarting of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. Guy Fawkes was the
explosives specialist of the plot. He was scheduled to be
but escaped that fate by prematurely
hanging himself by jumping from the scaffold with the noose
around his neck. He is now symbolically re-executed each year on
5th November (Bonfire Night), when effigies of him, called guys,
are burned on bonfires all over England. The 'pennies' that
children collect are traditionally spent on fireworks. This had a
secular and political rather than religious or supernatural
motivation, but it clearly inherited much from souling.
The USA, where the tradition is
trick or treating
. This 20th
century tradition has many of the features of the earlier rituals,
a knowledge of which were of course brought to the USA by
immigrants from Europe.
Scotland, where it is called guising. This is a clear predecessor
of
trick or treat
. The main difference between the two was
that
the children performed small entertainments before being
given