We’re all familiar with the trappings of Halloween that we know and love today: trick or treating, jack o’ lantern carving, costume parades, witches and skeletons and ghosts and black cats…but why are those Halloween traditions? Why do we go from house to house asking for candy? Why do we dress up as ghouls and celebrities? Why do we believe the veil between our world and the afterlife is thinnest on the evening of October 31st?

This week, Carrie takes us way back to the Ancient Celts to the origins of Halloween in the seasonal holiday of Samhain, a feast honoring the harvest and the dead that eventually became All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days in the Catholic tradition, then All Hallows Eve, and eventually – with the American melting pot’s help – modern-day Halloween.

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