So first of all, 31st October was a few days back, so Happy Happy Halloween! And shout out to you if you too like me stayed at home this Halloween and painted or carved pumpkins instead. You are the real deal :p

Halloween is a festival we never celebrated in India. I don’t think I had an idea there was any such thing until a few years ago. But now, since moving to the US, I have seen so many people celebrating it, dressing up all scary and spooky and having a fun fun time celebrating the festival.

Pumpkin Painting

I had legit no plans of celebrating Halloween or actually, to be honest, I do not really care about it. I cannot think of me pulling off those weird costumes. Last year, we went for a Halloween Bar Crawl and saw some really fun costumes that people had put together. It was a fun night but I did not have specific plans for this year (which is perfectly okay). A petition to normalize not having plans for every single festival or event.

The only thing I did for this year, was yes, as the title suggests painted a pumpkin. A friend of mine who is a really good artist and an expert at painting hosted a pumpkin painting party.

Here’s what we drew (As you can see, all three are the same pictures with different effects. Yes, that’s how indecisive I am :p) :

It was a really fun morning and I enjoyed it a lot. But the actual fun part of it was that because of this experience and also because I wanted to write about it here, I read up on why do we actually celebrate Halloween and more importantly, what do pumpkins have to do with it anyway? Yes, I had no clue till now.

History of Halloween

After reading a good number of articles, here’s what I have learned :

The back story is originally from Ireland (around 3000 years ago). It is a celebration of the post-harvest time. The end of plenty and times of scarcity. This was a tradition of the Celts. The Celts were a collection of tribes with origins in central Europe that shared a similar language, religious beliefs, traditions and culture. It’s believed that the Celtic culture started to evolve as early as 1200 B.C.) Read more in detail here.

This is a time when the Celts celebrated their ancient festival of Samhain. Here’s a video about it. The Celts celebrated their New Year on November 1. It is a welcome to the “dark half of the year”. The Celts believed that the barriers between the physical world and the spirit world break down during this festival and the ghosts returned on earth.

Pagans have been broadly defined as anyone involved in any religious act, practice, or ceremony which is not Christian. Jews and Muslims also use the term to refer to anyone outside their religion. In order to remove the pagan religion, Pope Gregory III designated November 1 to be celebrated as “All Souls Day” in honor of the saints and martyrs of Christianity.

When it came to people, they celebrated in a way that was very similar to Samhain with huge bonfires, costumes and allusions to angels, devils and saints. Another name for the celebration was All Hallows’ Day and the night before it was called All Hallows Eve – which is where the word ‘Halloween’ comes from.

History of Pumpkins and Halloween

Now the second part of it. How does pumpkin get associated with “Halloween”? The story originates from an Irish myth about a man named Stingy Jack, who tricked the Devil for ulterior financial motives. At the time of his death, he wasn’t able to get in either Hell or Heaven and ended up roaming around the Earth for eternity.

People were scared about the wandering soul of Jack and hence, decided to carve scary faces into turnips to scare him away. And how did we land on pumpkins then, you ask? Well, when Irish immigrants moved to the US, they decided to go for pumpkins instead of turnips owing just to natural availability. Weird, right? A tradition that so many of us are following and it was just because of the availability.

This is also a reason why carved pumpkins are called ‘Jack-O-Lanterns’.

Ah, so as you might have guessed, the painting was fun, therapeutic in a sense but knowing about this spooky, weird turn of events kinda story was the icing on the cake. It makes me think there is so much stuff to know, if only we ask why for everything we do. Each ritual, each festival has some deeper meaning or at least a quirky, weird (in this case, spooky) story behind it.

That’s all for this time I guess. Thank you so much for reading through this. Read more on what I am up to here. Also, the challenges that I am working on here.

Read more about me here 🙂

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Feya Shah

Living life one day at a time and on the side, telling you about it!