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✨Greetings Ghouls & Gals✨

Happy Halloween!


Jack o' Lanterns🎃

Halloween is among the oldest traditions in the world as it touches on an essential element of the human condition: the relationship between the living and the dead. The observance evolved from ancient rituals marking the transition from summer to winter, thereby associating it with transformation, which is still a central theme of the holiday.

Halloween traditions in the West date back thousands of years to the festival of Samhain (pronounced 'Soo-when', 'So-ween' or 'Saw-wen'), the Celtic New Year's festival. The name means "summer's end", and the festival marked the close of the harvest season and the coming of winter. The Celts believed that the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead was thinnest at this time and so the dead could return and walk where they had before. Furthermore, those who had died in the past year and who, for one reason or another, had not yet moved on, could do so at this time and might interact with the living in saying good-bye.
The first Halloween-like festivities in America started in the southern colonies. People began to celebrate the harvest, swap ghost stories and tell each other's fortunes. The holiday we celebrate as Halloween today really started taking off in the middle of the 19th century, when a wave of Irish immigrants left their country during the potato famine. The newcomers brought their own superstitions and customs, including the jack-o'-lantern. But back then, they carved them out of turnips, potatoes and beets instead of pumpkins. Trick-or-treating skyrocketed in popularity by the 1950s, when Halloween became a true national event.

Today, over 179 million Americans celebrate the holiday — and spend about $9.1 billion annually in the process.