For most, Halloween is an autumn holiday for dressing up in costumes, focusing on spooky stories, and for children to go about begging for candy. That was my childhood memory of Halloween and it remained the same for much of my adult life – just a fun day and evening of dressing up with the opportunity to hoard sweet treats that were very scarce the rest of the year. For an unreligious household, there was never anything wrong with Halloween except for candy gluttony that sometimes ended up with a stomach ache.

Then came my years as a Christian which had me take more notice of the spiritual focuses of the holiday. The church often teaches that Halloween is demonic and derived from the ancient pagan Celtic holiday called Samhain (pronounced “sah-win” in Irish), so Christians shouldn’t participate in any Halloween traditions. Indeed, sometimes there is too much focus on darkness and the occult during Halloween that really can be harmful; things like séances, necromancy, channeling the dead, witchcraft, sorcery, and watching excessively gory and inappropriate horror movies. They can all negatively affect your spiritual and mental wellbeing in ways that you wouldn’t expect, so there is good reason why the church is worried about people celebrating Halloween.

But what I had focused on during Halloween and what most households focus on is generally harmless – wearing costumes, collecting treats, and good-natured fun. For the average household, any religious or spiritual aspects of the holiday are not present. Still, is there more to the origins of Halloween that should make us think twice about participating in it altogether?

As a long-time student of Irish culture, I know it is true that Halloween did come from Samhain, one of the most important holidays for the ancient Celts and their druidic religion^{[1.1, 1.2, 1.3]}. It was originally celebrated on the full moon midway between the Autumnal Equinox and the Winter Solstice^[1.3], which are when day and night are about equal and when daylight is shortest and night is longest, respectively. Later, Samhain became fixed to November 1st, but like many ancient cultures, including the Jews, a new day began at sundown because sunset ends a day, so celebrations for Samhain began on Samhain Eve which is October 31, the date we know as Halloween.

For the ancient Irish and Celts, though, Samhain was a harvest and pastoral holiday (as in shepherding) that marked the end of summer and the beginning of winter^{[1.1, 1.2, 1.4, 1.5]}. It was a marking of the change from warm weather operations to cold weather routines. In fact, many scholars think Samhain means “summer’s end”^{[1.4, 1.6, 1.7]}. The Celts actually considered Samhain their New Year, which seems like an odd thing to celebrate at the end of harvest and beginning of winter when the world stops growing and goes dark and cold. We usually think of New Year’s as a time of new beginnings and renewal which commonly is associated with springtime. Indeed many ancient civilizations marked their New Year’s closer to the end of winter when spring growth started.

However, there is another ancient culture that marks a New Year near the end of the harvest season. Does Rosh Hashana sound familiar? It’s known as the Jewish New Year, though in the Bible, it was never instated as a New Year (see Yom Teruah/Rosh Hashana for more about that holiday).

Did the ancient Jews and ancient Celts view seasonal change in the same way? There are many legends that the ancient Irish came from the exiled tribes of Israel when their kingdoms were destroyed by the Assyrians and Babylonians, and it’s no secret that many Jews think that the stereotypic Irish rua or redhead came from the famously “reddish or ruddy” ancient Israelite, King David (1 Samuel/Shmuel I 16:12, 17:42) (for more about these claims, see Myths or Facts? Jeremiah’s tomb is in Ireland and the Celts descend from the ancient Lost Tribes of Israel).

Legends aside, there does appear to be a similarity to the New Year’s thinking of the ancient Jews and ancient Celts. The Celts saw the beginning of winter – darkness – as the start of the New Year because it was like a baby in the womb and a seed in the ground^[1.7]. Before birth and before growth sprouts, the baby and seed are in darkness, so the end of summer and beginning of winter, a new year beginning in darkness, was analogous to the cycle of life. This logical cycle of life may very well be why the ancient Hebrews began to celebrate their New Year at the end of summer as well.

This logical thinking of the ancients is also reflected in how they counted a person’s age. Someone was already 1 year old when they were born because the beginning of life began at conception, not birth, which obviously is true, and the ancient Jews followed that logic as can be seen by how Yeshua’s (Jesus’s) age was counted in the New Testament (see There was not enough oil but the menorah remained lit for details about how ancient Jews counted a person’s age).

So far Samhain, the precursor to Halloween, doesn’t seem very harmful, at least in its most common modern incarnations. If you don’t focus on any occult practices or consume excessively dark media, then Halloween is just an occasion to have some spooky fun. But on the other hand, if you do focus on the occult or other historic rituals and worship related to Halloween and Samhain, then you’d best keep reading and learn more. Your spiritual and physical health could be seriously affected by the wrong focuses.

But maybe even more surprising for Christians is that many of the unhealthy, so-called “heathen” practices of Halloween, actually came from the church. Samhain came to be called Halloween because when the church tried to move people away from celebrating Samhain, a very popular and important holiday for most of northwestern Europe, Ireland, and the British Isles, the church instated an All Saints Day on November 1st to replace Samhain and shifted focus to celebrating the saints instead of harvest and New Year^{[1.1, 1.2, 1.3]}.

In English, the church’s All Saints Day was called All Hallows Day, and of course, people continued to start their holiday celebrations on the night before or its eve, so All Hallows Eve came to replace the start of Samhain. Eventually, All Hallows Eve contracted into Halloween from Hallow and Even, an archaic word and contraction for evening^{[1.8, 1.9]}.

When All Hallows Day was widely celebrated by the church, it used the same focus of Samhain for using prayer and ritual to ward off evil so that the coming dark, winter months would be blessed. Samhain was considered to be a time when spirits and the deceased would have more effect on humans because the Celts believed the barrier between the spirit realm and physical world was most weak during Samhain. It brought about legends of the sí or fairyfolk and mystical beasts coming to cause both mischief and good fortune upon people.

Large bonfires were traditional on Samhain to ward off the darkness of the coming months and evil spirits, and of course, death and the spirits of the dead were major themes^{[1.2, 1.3]}. Obviously, the church was very successful in channeling that death theme by redirecting it upon the dead saints, and so All Hallows Day became a popular time to pray to the saints for blessings and even to worship them. Unfortunately, unknown to most of the church, those are bad practices that I urge everyone to not participate in because they bring people into the sin of idolatry – worshipping anything other than God.

In addition to All Hallows, the church extended the holiday with another on the next day, November 2nd. That became All Souls Day, in which people focused on praying for the souls of deceased loved ones so that they might come out of purgatory and be released into heaven^[1.1]. Unlike the idolatrous focuses of All Hallows, there is nothing wrong with praying for the souls of our dead loved ones. Purgatory is a real spiritual realm where souls are held in a grieved state because of sins in life. I’ve seen more than enough real world evidence of it to know it is real (see Abortion's Unseen Consequences for an example).

Samhain was also a popular time to consult the dead and divine or tell fortunes because the veil between the spiritual and physical worlds was thin. These occult practices of necromancy and consulting the dead, unfortunately continued into the church age as people shifted their consultation to the dead saints, trying to find answers for everything including the future.

The Celtic druids (the priesthood class of the ancient Celts) also helped with this divination by being channels or mediums for the spirits. And one popular Irish or Celtic tradition they inspired for Samhain and Halloween to this day is to bake a bairín breac (Anglized as barmbrack) with a fortune telling item baked inside to tell the recipient of the loaf a fortune, much like fortune cookies do^[1.10]. Barnbrack is a type of shortbread (unyeasted but leavened with baking soda) baked with dried fruit, like raisins and berries, mixed throughout the dough.

This bread was a popular way to use and preserve the fruits of the harvest, but somewhere in the history of Samhain, people began to bake objects into them, like a ring or bean, to signal a good or bad fortune^{[1.10, 1.11]}. For example, a ring would mean marriage would come in the next year, while the bean would mean the person would have a future without money. Doing this seems like a fun way to tell the future, but if you do this seriously, intending to tell someone’s future, it is the sin of divination or fortune telling, something we should avoid (1 Samuel/Shmuel I 15:23; Isaiah/Yeshayahu 8:19, 20:6-7; also Leviticus/Vayikra 19:31; see Divination, Idolatry, Witchcraft and the Curse of False Gospels for more).

If, however, you bake something, like a ring into a loaf, for example, intending to surprise your beloved with a marriage proposal, then there is nothing wrong with that. It is divination or telling fortunes that is a sin that has many negative spiritual effects on people. Even fortune cookies can have people slip in divination, which was a reason why God had me unexpectedly meet a newlywed couple to talk about their fortune cookie (see There’s True Love in 2022 for more).

So out of the most popular Halloween traditions that some people think are demonic, like carving pumpkins, dressing in costumes, having mildly scary fun, or begging for treats, none are truly demonic or harmful. Many of those traditions don’t even originate with Samhain or the ancient Celts^[1.1]. Samhain’s traditional harvest and New Year celebration are also harmless celebration. It’s when dark occult practices, like divination, witchcraft, sorcery, and channeling the dead, come into play that we should be wary of and remove ourselves from.

Because of those bad focuses, I suggest people keep their families away from media that overemphasizes sorcery and the occult, like the Harry Potter series and even more recent Star Wars films (see May the 4th is really about Faith, Hope and Love for more). Letting our children and the impressionable fall in love with occult practices can be a harmful doorway into having them practice occult arts later on because they’re taught the occult is good and normal. That is what “indoctrination” means.

If you’re taught something is the correct and good way for living and thinking, then obviously you will have no hesitancy to avoid it, even though it can be very harmful to you and your community. Indoctrination with bad and false teachings has plagued the church and all peoples and communities throughout history, and its effects have been seen through the peoples’ many atrocities and destructions. They prove that God keeps His word – that He will judge the peoples’ sins and those of His own chosen ones (Hebrews 10:19-31, 12:4-11; Psalm/Tehillim 135:14; Isaiah/Yeshayahu 3:13-15; Romans 2:5-11; Ephesians 6:5-8; Colossians 3:25; Jeremiah/Yirmiyahu 32:19; Numbers/Bamidbar 14:18; Nahum/Nachum 1:3; Proverbs/Mishlei 24:12).

Halloween and Samhain shouldn’t be demonized as long you keep your focuses in check, just like with Christmas and Pascha/Easter which can also easily go into the wrong focuses of love, community, and fun while omitting God and Christ. And even Valentine’s Day, often linked to pagan fertility worship turned out to be an untrue connection, but in fact is a holiday God does want us to think further about (see Countdown to Valentine’s Day for details).

Sometimes there is overzealous pointing of fingers when things aren’t as clear-cut as naysayers make out to be. We saw that here with Halloween’s different incorporation of sins that the misguided church also perpetuated, so have a little Halloween fun if you want to, but keep you and your family from going too far with the themes of death, the dead, and the occult.

Instead of focusing on cold, dark, and lifeless days after Halloween, it may be better for you to keep in mind the ancient notions of Samhain and winter – that of a new beginning and life that grows in darkness, yet comes to sprout and give birth in the months ahead. This theme is prevalent in Irish culture when you consider that the time from Halloween until Shrovetide (the Tuesday before Lent)^[1.13] has a focus on love and romance.

Remember the rings baked into barmbrack and hopes of a permanent and blissful union? Halloween or Samhain - at winter’s start - through Shrovetide, at winter’s end when the fasting of Lent comes just before the Holy Week of Christ during Pascha or Easter-time^{[1.12, 1.13]}; It’s when spring growth comes to renew the earth, and so brings the warmth of life to the forefront, which for the Irish, this hope glowed and kept warm the growing hope of love all through the dark and cold of winter.

May your winter days be so warmed and glowing through the blessings and promises of our God in Mashiach Yeshua (Christ Jesus). Amen.