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Halloween Comes
to America
Celebration of Halloween was
extremely limited in colonial
New England because of the
rigid Protestant belief systems
there. Halloween
was much
more common
in Maryland and
the southern
colo-
nies. As the
beliefs
and customs of different Euro-
pean ethnic groups as well as
the American Indians meshed,
a distinctly American version of
Halloween began to emerge. The
first celebrations included “play
parties,” public events held
to celebrate the harvest,
where neighbors would
share stories of the
dead, tell each
other’s fortunes,
dance and sing.
Colonial Hal-
loween festivi-
ties also featured the telling of
ghost stories and mischief mak-
ing of all kinds. By
the middle of the
nineteenth cen-
tury, annual
autumn festivi-
ties
were common, but Halloween
was not yet celebrated every-
where in the country.
In the second half of
the nineteenth cen-
tury, America was flooded
with new immigrants.
These new immi-
grants, especially
the millions of
Irish fleeing
Ireland’s potato
famine of 1846,
helped to popu-
larize the cel-
ebration of
Halloween
nation-
ally. Taking
from Irish
and English tradi-
tions, Americans
began to dress up in
costumes and go house to
house asking for food
or money, a
prac-
tice that
even-
tually
became
today’s
“trick-
or-treat”
tradition. Young
women believed
that on Halloween they could
divine the name or
appear-
ance of their
fu-
ture
husband
by doing
tricks with yarn, apple parings
or mirrors.
In the late 1800s, there was a
move in America to mold Hal-
loween into a holiday more about
community and neighborly
get-togethers than about ghosts,
pranks and witchcraft. At the
turn of the century, Halloween