Halloween Straw Man

Halloween (from All Hallows' Eve, the evening before All Saints' Day) designates the folk customs on the evening and night before the Solemnity of All Saints' Day, from October 31 to November 1. This custom was originally prevalent primarily in Catholic Ireland. Irish immigrants to the United States maintained and expanded their customs in memory of their homeland. In the course of the Irish Renaissance after 1830, early folkloristic literature assumed a continuity of Halloween customs since Celtic times and references to pagan and Celtic traditions such as the Samhain festival. Since the 1990s, Halloween customs in their U.S. form have also spread to continental Europe.

There are clear regional differences. In the German-speaking countries in particular, local customs such as ghosting turnips or Traulicht were mixed with Halloween, and traditional pumpkin-growing regions such as Styria or the Spreewald quickly adopted Halloween. The origin story of the feast day All Saints' Day goes back to a feast of all the holy martyrs celebrated on May 13, the consecration day of the church Sancta Maria ad martyres in Rome, when Pope Boniface IV consecrated the Pantheon, a temple dedicated to all the Roman gods, to the Virgin Mary and all the holy martyrs in 609 or 610.

Pope Gregory III consecrated a chapel in the Basilica of St. Peter to all the saints over a hundred years later, setting the feast day for the city of Rome on November 1; Gregory IV adopted this feast date into the Roman general calendar. The religious anthropologist Sir James Frazer described Halloween in his standard work The Golden Bough (in the 1922 edition) as an "ancient pagan festival of the dead with a thin Christian covering"; in addition to the spring festival Beltane on May 1 (Walpurgis Night), it was the second important festival of the Celts. It is proved since the 8th century, when Christian synods tried to abolish such pagan rites.