Where Halloween Comes From

What the Word Means §

Hallow is an old English word for a holy person, a saint. It comes from the Old English halga, and today, Etymonline says, it is “obsolete except in Halloween.”¹ By about 1300 the night before All Saints was called alle halwe eue. The Scots shortened it, and the form “Halloween” turns up in the 1560s. Robert Burns’s poem of 1785 is what made the word and its lore popular.²

The verb is one you already pray. The hallowed in “hallowed be thy name” is the same word, which Christian translators used for the Latin sanctificare.¹ To hallow God’s name, the Catechism says, is “to recognize as holy, to treat in a holy way” (Catechism, 2807).

Holiday has the same root. It comes from the Old English haligdæg, from halig, holy, and dæg, day. In the 1300s it meant both a church festival and a day off work, and in the 1500s the two meanings, and the two pronunciations, went their separate ways.³ Halloween is one of the few holidays that still has the saints in its name.

How All Saints Came to 1 November §

A feast for all the martyrs is old. St. Ephrem the Syrian, who died about 373, knew one kept on 13 May. On 13 May 609 (some sources say 610), Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome as a church in honor of the Blessed Virgin and all the martyrs, and ordered the anniversary kept.^{4 5}

The first sign of 1 November comes in the next century. Pope Gregory III (731 to 741) consecrated a chapel in St. Peter’s to all the saints and fixed its anniversary for that day. By 800 the English scholar Alcuin was keeping All Saints on 1 November, and a ninth-century English calendar has it on that day too. Gregory IV (827 to 844) extended the feast to the whole Church; Britannica dates his order to 837.^{4 5}

The vigil, the night before, seems to have been kept as early as the feast itself, and Pope Sixtus IV (1471 to 1484) gave the feast an octave.⁴ In medieval England the day was All Hallows, or Hallowmas, and the first week of November was Hallowtide.²

Where All Souls Comes From §

Praying for the dead is older than any of these feasts. Vatican News notes evidence from the second century that Christians “prayed for and celebrated the Eucharist for their beloved dead,” first on the third day after burial and on the anniversary, later on the seventh and thirtieth days.⁶ Early on, the names of the dead were written in the diptychs, and by the sixth century Benedictine monasteries held a commemoration of their own dead at Whitsuntide.⁷

The day for all of them came from Cluny. St. Odilo, its abbot (he died in 1048), ordered his houses to keep a commemoration of all the faithful departed every year on 2 November, chosen to follow All Saints.⁸ Vatican News gives the year as 998. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1911 thought it was “probably not in 998 but after 1030.”^{6 9} Either way, the day spread to other Benedictines and the Carthusians, and it was kept almost everywhere before the end of the thirteenth century.^{7 8}

In 1915, moved by the enormous loss of life in the First World War,⁸ Pope Benedict XV let every priest in the world offer three Masses on All Souls Day (Incruentum Altaris). Benedict XIV had granted the same to Spain and Portugal in 1748. What he allowed, and what it means for a parish this November, is in All Souls and November Mass Intentions.

Is Halloween Pagan? §

You’ll often read that Halloween began as Samhain, a Celtic festival of the dead, and that the Church put All Saints on 1 November to replace it. The Library of Congress’s own guide to the holiday says so.¹⁰

The evidence is thinner than that makes it sound. “Very little can be said with certainty about the ancient Samhain observances, because evidence is sparse,” Britannica says. Irish tales of the tenth and twelfth centuries mention Samhain as a date, but the fuller descriptions come only from the eighteenth century, and “it is unclear what elements of Samhain survived in local Allhallowtide traditions in Ireland and Great Britain.”¹¹ The idea that Samhain was the Celtic New Year, says Stephen Winick, a folklorist at the Library of Congress, “only arose in the late nineteenth century.” He still calls it “pretty certain” that Halloween began with Samhain.¹²

So the scholars don’t agree, and the honest answer has two halves. The name and the date are Christian: the first signs of 1 November as All Saints come from Rome, from Alcuin and from English calendars, and none of the sources we read points to a papal document saying the date was picked to replace a Celtic feast. Whether a few of the night’s customs are older than the feast, nobody can now prove or disprove.

Soul Cakes, Turnips and Trick or Treat §

Long before candy, there was the soul cake. In the Middle Ages, English Heritage says, people went “souling” around Halloween and All Souls, from door to door “singing and saying prayers for the souls of the treat givers, their friends, and deceased relatives, in exchange for a Soul Cake,” a small round cake more like a biscuit, sometimes spiced, with raisins or currants. Its historian quotes a line from 1511: “we read in old time good people would on All Halloween Day bake bread and deal it for all Christian souls.”¹³ Scottish accounts, as Britannica tells it, have children and the poor collecting food and money in return for prayers for the dead; later the prayers gave way to tricks, songs and jokes.¹⁴ The knock on the door began as an offer to pray.

The jack-o’-lantern took a longer road. In the 1650s, “Jack with the lanthorn” was a name for the will-o’-the-wisp, the ignis fatuus. It was first used for a carved pumpkin in American English, by 1828.¹⁵ Before pumpkins, in the British Isles, people carved large turnips and other vegetables, and Irish folklore tied the lantern to Stingy Jack, a man who tricked the Devil.¹⁴

“Trick or treat” itself is younger than most people think. The earliest use the historical dictionary of Canadian English has found is from a newspaper in Blackie, Alberta, in November 1927, where “the youthful tormentors were at back door and front demanding edible plunder by the word ‘trick or treat.’”¹⁶ (Etymonline puts it a year earlier, in 1926, also in Canada.¹⁵)

Why Skulls? §

Memento mori is Latin for “remember that you must die.” It was in English by 1598, and Merriam-Webster gives a second meaning: a death’s-head, like the skulls on old Puritan gravestones, put there for the living to read.¹⁷ Every Catholic hears the same reminder on Ash Wednesday, when the ashes go on with the words “Remember that you are dust and unto dust you shall return” (John Paul II, Ash Wednesday 2002).

The painters took it up. In Joos van Cleve’s Saint Jerome in His Study (1521), now at Harvard, the saint holds his head and points at a skull beside a snuffed-out candle, under a note on the wall that reads Respice finem, “consider the end.”¹⁸ The dance of death did the same thing at full size. The earliest known example was a series of paintings of 1424 and 1425 in the Cimetière des Innocents in Paris: the living in order of rank, from pope and emperor down to a child, and the dead leading them to the grave. Britannica calls it “a stern reminder of the imminence of death and a summons to repentance.”¹⁹

Then there are the bones themselves. In their crypt in Rome, the Capuchins keep the remains of about 3,700 people, most of them friars, with skulls and bones laid into the walls and vaults. The friars’ own site calls the crypt un suggestivo memento mori, a striking reminder of death.²⁰ A plaque in the crypt reads, in Aleteia’s English, “What you are now, we once were, what we are now, you will become.”²¹ At Sedlec, in the Czech Republic, the parish that keeps the bone chapel describes its message as memento mori, says it is hard to tell who arranged the bones or when, and still celebrates Mass there.²²

The Day of the Dead §

In Mexico, the last days of October and the first of November became something of their own. UNESCO, which added the Day of the Dead to its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity in 2008, calls it “the fusion of pre-Hispanic religious rites and Catholic feasts,” one world Indigenous, the other brought by Europeans in the sixteenth century.²³ People build ofrendas, home altars with flowers, candles, food and photographs of the ones they’ve lost.¹⁴ The Library of Congress adds a small surprise for word lovers: the “los” in Día de los Muertos seems to come from translating the English “Day of the Dead” back into Spanish, and was rarely used in Latin America before the 1960s.¹⁰

Many of the skeletons people know come from one engraver. José Guadalupe Posada, who died in 1913, made calaveras, satirical skull and skeleton prints sold on cheap broadsides. His most famous lady skeleton, engraved in 1912, wasn’t called La Catrina at all. She was the Calavera Garbancera, a jab at the market women who sold chickpeas and, Sandoval writes, powdered their faces to pass as upper class. The name Catrina came in 1930, with the first book of his prints, and Diego Rivera put her at the center of a mural in 1947.²⁴

What the Church Was Doing All Along §

Under the costumes, Hallowtide is about two things: the saints in heaven, and the dead who still need our prayers. That second one goes back to Scripture. Judas Maccabeus prayed and offered sacrifice for his fallen soldiers, and “thus he made atonement for the dead that they might be absolved from their sin” (2 Maccabees 12:46).

“From the beginning the Church has honored the memory of the dead and offered prayers in suffrage for them, above all the Eucharistic sacrifice, so that, thus purified, they may attain the beatific vision of God” (Catechism, 1032). When St. Monica was dying, she told her sons not to worry about where they buried her: “I simply ask you to remember me at the Lord’s altar wherever you are” (Catechism, 1371).

That is what a Mass intention is: asking a priest to offer a Mass for someone, living or dead (what a Mass intention is). And the old Latin word on the skulls is in the Mass too. In the Roman Canon, after the consecration, the priest prays Memento etiam, Domine, “Remember also, Lord,” for those “who have gone before us with the sign of faith” (the Memento in the Mass). Memento mori asks you to remember your own death. The Memento of the dead asks God to remember the ones who have gone before you.

Hallowtide This Year §

This year Halloween falls on Saturday, 31 October, All Saints on Sunday, 1 November, and All Souls on Monday, 2 November (USCCB, Liturgical Calendar 2026). Sunday Mass is owed as it is every week, and a Mass on Saturday evening counts for it (canon 1248 §1), so you can go to Mass on Halloween night before the trick-or-treaters come.

If someone you love has died, these three days are the oldest time in the Church’s year to ask for a Mass for them. Call or stop by the parish office this week, give the name and the date you hope for, and ask early: each priest may take only one offered intention on All Souls (how to ask). It’s customary to give an offering, and priests are urged to offer Mass for people’s intentions even when nothing has been given (canon 945).