7 facts you didn’t know about Halloween

1,644 total views, 2 views today

Halloween is one of the biggest holidays of the year, but there are many things that you might not know about this spooky holiday. Below we share some facts you may not have known about Halloween.

The first fact is the costumes that are so much fun to put on weren’t always worn for fun in the early times of Halloween. Halloween is believed to be a Gaelic pagan celebration first known as Samhain. During this event, those who were superstitious were convinced that those who were dead would come back as spirits and walk around all day. During that time, those individuals would dress up in costumes in order to “scare” the spirits away. At the time they used masks, animal skins, and cowhides.

Another fact about Halloween is that it’s another season where people spend a lot of money on. Rivaling the Holiday season, people collectively spend billions of dollars on Halloween and preparing for it. It’s not out of the ordinary for sales of costumes to be over 2 billion dollars for people and millions spent on pet costumes. This is before we even get to the candy.

The height of candy sales normally happens on the 28th of October. Candy is obviously an important part of the celebration and it’s during those times where people buy more Skittles than any other candy, according to the Daily Meal.

Going back in history again, the first instances of Halloween occurred in Ireland. As mentioned before, Halloween is likely to stem from Samhain which was a Gaelic ritual practiced in ancient times, from which the Irish took on the ritual and evolved it from Samhain. Halloween didn’t actually come to Western society until Irish immigrants moved to America in the 19th century.

Another staple of Halloween is the costumes of course, but which is the most popular one? Despite all the fashion trends for Halloween, the most popular one is still the traditional witch costume. With well over 6 million witches running around in Halloween across the globe, it’s one of the most popular ones next to pirates, zombies, vampires, and more.

Another fun tradition is carving Jack-o-Lanterns, but did you know they weren’t originally made from pumpkins? When Halloween originally was celebrated, the purpose for carving root vegetables was to use as lanterns–which were actually carved out of turnips and it was only occasionally done with spooky faces. The reason they did this was again to ward of those evil spirits.

Or perhaps your tradition is to pull out some old horror movies and watch them late at night. One that you might pull out is “Halloween” which actually has an interesting fact about the film–it was made with a super low budget. This classic film was turned down by several large studios and so the director decided to make it independently. As a result, they had to use a lot of budgeting techniques. For example, for the iconic Michael Meyers mask, the crew went to the local Halloween store and bought the cheapest mask they could find: a William Shatner mask. After that, they reshaped the eye holes and painted the mask white, making the iconic horror character. The film was made on a budget of less than $320,000 and has netted over 60 million dollars worldwide to date.