It's Halloween!!

Para uma versão desta postagem em português, clique aqui: http://georgeroberts.blogspot.com/2010/10/e-halloween.html.

Today is Halloween, a day (or rather an evening) f0r trick-or-treating, costumes and parties. It's lots of fun! It is not an official holiday, that is, we don't stay home from work or school, but it is still widely celebrated. The word Halloween derives from All Hallow's Eve, which is on the calendar of Catholic holy days. Een (originally e'en) is a shortened form of evening = even, which in this case refers to the day before a holiday. We also celebrate Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, which is not called reveillon in English. Hallow is an obsolete word meaning "a saint". The word hallowed means sanctified, and appears at the beginning of the Lord's Prayer: "Our Father, Which art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name". But the origin of Halloween predates Christianity. As Wikipedia explains,

The origin of Halloween goes back to the traditions of the peoples who inhabited Gaul and the British Isles between the years 600 BC and 800 AD, although it was markedly different from the current celebration. Originally, Halloween was not related to witches. It was a festival of the Irish Celtic calendar, the festival of Samhain, celebrated between October 30 and
November 2 which marked the end of summer (samhain literally means "late summer").

On Halloween, children dress as monsters, witches, characters from popular culture and horror films and go door to door, offering those who open the door a choice: Trick or treat! The trick is the threat to do something bad if the homeowners don't give the children anything. Tricks of this kind are fairly rare, although it is not unheard of for kids to "decorate" the house of someone they don't like with toilet paper. The treat is something good to eat given by the person being visited. Supermarkets sell special bags of small chocolate bars for the occasion. Today, parents usually restrict their children's trick-or-treating to their friends' houses. The reason for this is sad. Over the past couple of decades, a few sadists have placed pieces of broken glass or razor blades inside the goodies to hurt children. On Halloween night, some hospitals offer the public the use of their x-ray machines to make sure there is nothing suspicious among the collected treats. It is interesting that the practice of trick-or-treating only got its name in the 1930s. When I was a kid, I imagined that this tradition had always existed, but the term was first attested in North America in 1927.

Another typical aspect of Halloween is jack o'lanterns, big carved-out pumpkins with a sinister expression and a candle inside. We used to put a jack o'lantern in the big front window of our house to create an appropriate ambience for our small visitors. " Jack" at one time meant man, and we still see this meaning of jack in the expression "jack of all trades, master of none" (in Portuguese, "pau para toda obra"), a worker who can do many things adequately, but nothing extremely well. Thus, during Halloween, the pumpkin is called "Jack of the Lantern" or the Lantern Man. This tradition originated in the practice of remembering lost souls in Purgatory with a candle lantern inside a turnip (These would have to be pretty big turnips!)

This celebration is spreading to countries that a few years ago were unacquainted with it. The Brazilian deputy Aldo Rebelo once proposed that Halloween be replaced by Saci Pererê Day, but his proposal fell on deaf ears. At least in English schools in Brazil, Halloween has been part of the calendar of events for many years.

So Happy Halloween!