Happy Halloween and the story behind it

Yesterday was halloween. It's also the day I believed where we traveled back through time. Well not literally. The daylight saving started and at the stroke of midnight, the clock turns back to an hour earlier. Yesterday was also the mark of the end of summer. If you read through the history you'll see the connection between end of summer, halloween and ghost. I found it very interesting.


Briefly, Halloween has roots in the Celtic (Western Europe) festival of Samhain (Old Irish means Summer's End). The festival of Samhain celebrate the end of the "lighter half" of the year and the beginning of the "darker half" that sometimes regarded as a Celtic New Year.

The ancient Celtic believed that the border between this world and the Otherworld becomes thin on Samhain. Allowing spirits both harmful and harmless to pass through. Their spirit of family's ancestors is honoured and invited to their home while the harmful spirit is warded off. It is believed the need to warded off the harmful spirits is by wearing costumes and masks resemble the harmful spirits like skeletons, witches, vampires etc. In Scotland the dead were impersonated by young men wearing masked, veiled or blackened faces, dressed in white.


The practice of dressing in costumes and begging door to door for treats originated in Britain and Ireland where the trick-or-treat resembles the late medieval practice of souling, when poor folk would go door to door receiving foods on Hallowmas (Nov 1) in return for prayers for the dead on Old Souls day (Nov 2). The name 'Halloween' and many of its presents day traditions is derived from the Old English Era. But today, Halloween (All Hallow Eve which means 'Evening') is largely a secular celebration where US has made it commercial for the other countries to recognised and celebrated it.


Interesting ey?


We're so worked up these past few weeks. By the time I'm home, there's only a few hours to eat, rest and chat with my husband before we goes to bed. Hence the lack of updates. I'm working as hard as possible before I took a long vacation to Malaysia by the end of the month. Fairuz on the other hand has taken all his big lump of holidays and dump it for Malaysia. So we can't really travel a lot this year. What a shame. Maybe next year.

Except when we're in Malaysia, we have a month of holidays. This would be the longest time I haven't went back home. So I quite excited to see does home changes a bit. Anyone has a great idea where to travel when we're in Malaysia since it's going to be monsoon season?