One of the most interesting things about Halloween is that it actually dates all the way back to an ancient Celtic festival that is known as Samhain.
My name is Ciara Ni Riain and I'm a lecturer at the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures.
Samhain is the first of four Celtic festivals, and it is actually an old Irish word.
One interpretation of that word is, it means the summers end, and it occurs on the eve of November 1st.
So it was a time of people coming together, holding meetings, having feasts, and it was also seen, of course, as the most dangerous of the Celtic festivals.
It was believed that the gods and supernatural beings would walk amongst humankind and that they would often play cruel tricks on unsuspecting victims.
And so it was this idea that kind of the normal rules of the human world would kind of just be temporarily thrown into chaos.
To protect yourself, you wanted to disguise yourself from these otherworldly creatures.
And in particular, parents would guise or disguise their children.
And that evolved then into trick-or-treating when Irish and Scottish immigrants came to the United States.
