The holiday we celebrate today as Halloween is a confluence of the old pagan festival Samhain (the beginning of the dark time of year), the Catholic All Saints Day (to honor all martyrs, known and unknown) which Protestants changed to All Souls Day (to honor the dead in general), and fall harvest festivals. This happened over several hundred years, with different cultures contributing their traditions for each event.
People in Victorian England were big on Halloween. It was a time for parties, often costume parties, with ghost stories and games that depended on supernatural divination (or superstition). Children were given treats such as nuts and fruit because the harvest was in. But the biggest promoter of Halloween was Queen Victoria herself. The Queen was far from the repressed prude she is described as today; she loved a big party, and her Halloween parties were legendary. Read how the Victorians really celebrated Halloween and how they handed down celebratory traditions for us to change and inflate at Grunge. -via Strange Company
Read more about some of the queen's Halloween parties here.
#Victorian #QueenVictoria