糖心Vlog

Its name derives from All Hallows鈥� Eve, the evening before the Western Christian feast of All Saint鈥檚 Day on November 1 (Santino, 1983). The observance belongs to Allhallowtide, a three-day period that includes All Saint鈥檚 Day and All Souls鈥� Day on November 2. Historians commonly connect Halloween鈥檚 development both to medieval Christian commemorations of saints and the dead and to older seasonal customs associated with Samhain, a Gaelic festival marking summer鈥檚 end and the beginning of the darker half of the year (Johnson). Samhain combined agricultural and pastoral ideas of work and seasonal ideas of time with supernatural ideas of life and death (Santino, 1983). It is best understood not as an unchanged survival of an ancient rite, but as a tradition that developed through the interaction of religious calendars, local folklore, migration, and popular culture.

In Ireland and Scotland, practices associated with Samhain included seasonal gatherings, divination, disguises, and protective rituals associated with a time of transition. Over centuries, these customs interacted with Christian observances and, through large-scale Irish and Scottish migration in the nineteenth century, were carried to North America. There, Halloween gradually shifted from a community and neighborhood celebration to a highly recognizable children鈥檚 holiday centered on masquerade, door-to-door visiting, and treats (History, 2019).

The modern tradition of trick-or-treating has several historical antecedents, including 鈥渟ouling,鈥� in which people went from household to household in exchange for food or small cakes while offering prayers for the dead. This later evolved into guising, where children donned a costume and went door to door accepting gifts, but they would have to sing a song, recite a poem, or tell a joke before they could accept the gift.

By the twentieth century, mass-produced costumes, greeting cards, decorations, films, and confectionery turned Halloween into a major annual occasion for consumption as well as social play. Consumer-culture scholar Russell W. Belk characterizes this evolution as an American ritual in which the boundaries between childhood and adulthood, order and disorder, and ordinary and fantastical identities can be temporarily reimagined.

D铆a de Muertos, observed primarily in Mexico on November 1 and 2, should not be understood as a Mexican version of Halloween; although both occur during the same season and involve death, they differ greatly in meaning, history, and practice. D铆a de Muertos is a family- and community-centered commemoration shaped by Indigenous Mexican traditions of honoring deceased relatives and Catholic observances of All Saints鈥� Day and All Souls鈥� Day, and it has continually evolved through religious and cultural exchange (Andrist, 2021).

Families create ofrendas, or altars, with photographs, candles, 肠别尘辫补蝉煤肠丑颈濒 (marigolds), food, beverages, and other offerings to welcome and remember loved ones who have died. Cemetery visits, storytelling, music, shared meals, skull imagery, and public gatherings portray death as part of enduring kinship, memory, and the cycle of life rather than simply as something to fear.

D铆a de Muertos also reflects the connection among religion, cultural tradition, and artistic expression in Hispanic understandings of death and dying (Andrist, 2021). However, it should not be treated as the only expression of Hispanic death practices, as this overlooks the diversity of traditions across the Hispanic world (Andrist, 2021). In Nepantla Familias, Stephanie Elizondo Griest uses D铆a de Muertos to reflect on Mexican American identity and the experience of living between Mexican and U.S. cultural worlds, showing that cultural belonging is both inherited and actively negotiated (Griest, 2021). UNESCO recognized Mexico鈥檚 Indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008, affirming its cultural significance and community-based transmission.

Today, Halloween-related celebrations circulate internationally through migration, tourism, retail, film, social media, and youth culture, but they take locally distinctive forms. In Japan, for example, Halloween has developed into a distinctive public costume culture, particularly among young adults in urban spaces such as Tokyo鈥檚 Shibuya district. Scholarly research on the subject examines street dressing-up as a contemporary cultural performance rather than a simple imitation of North American trick-or-treating. In other places, communities blend imported Halloween imagery with local autumn festivals, Christian observances, ancestral-remembrance practices, or commercial entertainment.

In Japan, Halloween has been absorbed into existing practices of cosplay, popular visual culture, and urban sociability. Researchers have described this as a form of social bricolage: participants combine imported Halloween imagery with anime, manga, gaming, horror aesthetics, and locally meaningful ideas of play and role reversal.