Halloween is my favorite event of the year.  I love seeing all of the people dressed in their costumes and having a good time.

I spend my Halloweens in The Montrose area of Houston most of the time.  The photos in this gallery are from that area and also a bar on Washington Avenue.

Halloween, also known as All Hallows’ Eve, can be traced back about 2,000 years to a pre-Christian Celtic festival held around Nov. 1 called Samhain (pronounced “sah-win”), which means “summer’s end” in Gaelic, according to the Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries.

I thought this girl’s Make – Up was pretty cool.  Zipper face.

You’ll always see Zombies and the Living Dead on Halloween.

Samhain is also thought to have been a time of communing with the dead, according to folklorist John Santino.

“There was a belief that it was a day when spirits of the dead would cross over into the other world,” Santino told Live Science.  Such moments of transition in the year have always been thought to be special and supernatural, he added.

Halloween provides a safe way to play with the concept of death, Santino said.  People dress up as the living dead, and fake gravestones adorn front lawns — activities that wouldn’t be tolerated at other times of the year, he said.

But according to Nicholas Rogers, a history professor at York University in Toronto and author of “Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night” (Oxford University Press, 2003), “there is no hard evidence that Samhain was specifically devoted to the dead or to ancestor worship.

“According to the ancient sagas, Samhain was the time when tribal peoples paid tribute to their conquerors and when the sidh [ancient mounds] might reveal the magnificent palaces of the gods of the underworld,” Rogers wrote.  Samhain was less about death or evil than about the changing of seasons and preparing for the dormancy (and rebirth) of nature as summer turned to winter, he said.

Though a direct connection between Halloween and Samhain has never been proven, many scholars believe that because All Saints’ Day (or All Hallows’ Mass, celebrated Nov. 1) and Samhain, are so close together on the calendar, they influenced each other and later combined into the celebration now called Halloween.

I ran into some cute Indians and had get a picture of them for you.

I also saw Thing 1, 2 & 3.

The tradition of dressing in costumes and trick-or-treating may go back to the practice of “mumming” and “guising,” in which people would disguise themselves and go door-to-door, asking for food, Santino said.

Early costumes were usually disguises, often woven out of straw, he said, and sometimes people wore costumes to perform in plays or skits.

This was another great job of Make – Up I thought.

Here’s a cute Sailor Girl.

Trick-or-treating didn’t start in the United States until World War II, but American kids were known to go out on Thanksgiving and ask for food — a practice known as Thanksgiving begging, Santino said.

These days, the “trick” part of the phrase “trick or treat” is mostly an empty threat, but pranks have long been a part of the holiday.

By the late 1800s, the tradition of playing tricks on Halloween was well established.  In the United States and Canada, the pranks included tipping over outhouses, opening farmers’ gates and egging houses.

But by the 1920s and ’30s, the celebrations more closely resembled an unruly block party, and the acts of vandalism got more serious.

Some people believe that because pranking was starting to get dangerous and out of hand, parents and town leaders began to encourage dressing up and trick-or-treating as a safe alternative to doing pranks, Santino said.

Apples are associated with Halloween, both as a treat and in the game of bobbing for apples, a game that since the colonial era in America was used for fortune-telling.

Legend has it that the first person to pluck an apple from the water-filled bucket without using his or her hands would be the first to marry, according to the book “Halloween and Commemorations of the Dead” (Chelsea House, 2009) by Roseanne Montillo.

Here are Princess Leia and her mother.

I had to get a picture with them.

I saw the Indians again.

Apples were also part of another form of marriage prophecy.  According to legend, on Halloween (sometimes at the stroke of midnight), young women would peel an apple into one continuous strip and throw it over her shoulder.

The apple skin would supposedly land in the shape of the first letter of her future husband’s name.

I love seeing Wonder Woman on Halloween.  It’s one of my favorite costumes for girls.

Another Halloween ritual involved looking in a mirror at midnight by candlelight, for a future husband’s face was said to appear. (A scary variation of this later became the “Bloody Mary” ritual familiar to many schoolgirls.)

Like many such childhood games, it was likely done in fun, though at least some people took it seriously.

Some evangelical Christians have expressed concern that Halloween is somehow satanic because of its roots in pagan ritual.  However, ancient Celts did not worship anything resembling the Christian devil and had no concept of it.

In fact, the Samhain festival had long since vanished by the time the Catholic Church began persecuting witches in its search for satanic cabals.

Here’s a very cute Charlie Chaplin that I ran into on the streets of The Montrose.

And, of course, black cats do not need to have any association with witchcraft to be considered evil — simply crossing their path is considered bad luck any time of year.

These next photos are from a bar on Washington Avenue.

This girl made a cute little Bat Girl.

Through the ages, various supernatural entities — including fairies and witches — came to be associated with Halloween, and more than a century ago in Ireland, the event was said to be a time when spirits of the dead could return to their old haunting grounds.

Dressing up as ghosts or witches became fashionable, though as the holiday became more widespread and more commercialized (and with the arrival of mass-manufactured costumes), the selection of disguises for kids and adults greatly expanded beyond monsters to include everything from superheroes to princesses to politicians and much, much more.

Orange and black are Halloween colors because orange is associated with the Fall harvest and black is associated with darkness and death.

Jack o’ Lanterns originated in Ireland, where people placed candles in hollowed-out turnips to keep away spirits and ghosts on the Samhain holiday.

Halloween was brought to North America by immigrants from Europe who would celebrate the harvest around a bonfire, share ghost stories, sing, dance and tell fortunes.

Tootsie Rolls were the first wrapped penny candy in America.

The ancient Celts thought that spirits and ghosts roamed the countryside on Halloween night.  They began wearing masks and costumes to avoid being recognized as human.

Halloween candy sales average about 2 billion dollars annually in the United States.

Chocolate candy bars top the list as the most popular candy for trick-or-treaters, with Snickers #1.

Halloween is the 2nd most commercially successful holiday, with Christmas being the first.

The fear of Halloween is known as Samhainopobia.

The original movie, “Halloween”, was made in only 21 days in 1978 on a very limited budget.

The movie was shot in the Spring and used fake autumn leaves.

The mask used by Michael Meyers in the movie “Halloween” was actually William Shatner’s mask painted white.

The character Laurie Strode, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, was named after John Carpenter’s first girlfriend.

While the setting for the story is in Illinois, the vehicles have California license plates.

If you see a spider on Halloween, it is the spirit of a loved on watching over you.

The Ouija Board ended up outselling the game of Monopoly in its’ first full year at Salem.  Over two million copies of the Ouija Board were shipped.

Every year, you’ll see a Man of Religion out and about having a drink and some fun.

I thought the girl on the left was very attractive.

Her and her friend were nice enough to pose for photos.

I thought this girl had the most beautiful face that I saw during Halloween and her Make – Up was very cool too.

I hope you have enjoyed reading all about Halloween and looking at my photos.

You can see more than 25,000 travel photos on my website, as well as my videos.

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Spider Michaels

https://SpiderMichaels.com