Halloween Parties in Somerset
Halloween Parties in Somerset are big calendar events, and many people hold Halloween Parties every year and with large guest lists comes the need for extra toilet facilities. Griffin Toilet Hire can hire individual portable cubicles for parties and events where the host may wish to hold the event outside and would rather not have guests bring mud into the house! Griffin Toilet Hire portable cubicles can also be used as an additional toilet facility for garage or house parties.
Halloween is traditionally celebrated on the 31st October although many parties and fancy dress events are held weekends either side of the 31st.
Halloween originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, (pronounced sow-in) when people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off ghosts. This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31 they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth.
To commemorate the event, Druids (Celtic priests) built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities. During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other’s fortunes.
By the 9th century the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands, where it gradually blended with and supplanted the older Celtic rites. In 1000 A.D., the church would make November 2 All Souls’ Day, a day to honor the dead. It’s widely believed today that the church was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related church-sanctioned holiday.
All Souls Day was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels and devils. The All Saints Day celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints’ Day) and the night before it, the traditional night of Samhain in the Celtic religion, began to be called All-Hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween.
Halloween Traditions
Trick-or-Treat
Borrowing from Irish and English traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to house asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became today’s “trick-or-treat” tradition. Young women believed that on Halloween they could divine the name or appearance of their future husband by doing tricks with yarn, apple parings or mirrors.
In the late 1800s, there was a move in America to mold Halloween into a holiday more about community and neighbourly get-togethers than about ghosts, pranks and witchcraft. At the turn of the century, Halloween parties for both children and adults became the most common way to celebrate the day. Parties focused on games, foods of the season and festive costumes.
Spooky Halloween Themes
Halloween Parties in Somerset have activities including trick-or-treating, attending Halloween parties, carving pumpkins lighting bonfires, apple bobbing, divination games, playing pranks, visiting haunted attractions, telling scary stories, and watching horror films.
Children in Halloween Dress
Pumpkin Carving is now a fun tradition
