Halloween is the season for little ghosts and goblins to take to the streets asking for candy and scaring each other silly. Spooky stories are told around fires, scary movies appear in theaters, and pumpkins are expertly (and not-so-expertly) carved into jack-o'-lanterns.
Amid all the commercialism, haunted houses, and bogus warnings about razors in apples, the origins of Halloween are often overlooked. Yet Halloween is much more than just costumes and candy; in fact the holiday has a rich and interesting history.
Halloween can be traced back about 2,000 years to an Oct. 31 Gaelic festival called Samhain (pronounced "sah-win"), which means "summer's end" in Gaelic. Because ancient records are sparse and fragmentary, the exact nature of Samhain is not fully understood, but it was an annual communal meeting at the end of the harvest year, a time to gather resources for the winter months. There were supernatural and religious aspects to the pagan festival, though nothing that would be considered sinister by modern standards