This post is a bit late, but no matter. What’s not to love about Halloween? Everyone gets to pretend they are a child for a day. If they actually are a child, they get to pretend they are whatever they want to be, for example Minions or Yoda!

Celebrities are often very creative with their costumes. My favorite is Katy Perry’s “Mic Drop”:

A mic drop is when you drop your mic at the end of a performance because it was really good, or something you said was really shocking. Her costume is so meta.

And what would salt and pepper be without cumin?! HIMYM clip.

Talk show hosts post really funny videos, like Jimmy Kimmel’s “Hey Jimmy Kimmel, I Told My Kids I Ate All Their Halloween Candy” (click for lots of crying children), or Ellen Degeneres’ pranking her employees by sending them to Haunted Houses.

Maybe the most obvious reason to love Halloween? Free candy!

Every American child has had that iconic pumpkin head basket while they trick-or-treated, though we usually just say the first line of the iconic poem…

It’s the one day of the year we have full knowledge that we are rotting our teeth (especially if we are eating candy corn) and making our dentists cry, but we don’t have to care about it.

Sometimes old people who don’t like the holiday give pennies instead of candy.

I trick-or-treated until I was about 19… which means… until I was so old that people didn’t want to give me candy anymore. 😛 Hey, I tried. I was just trying to keep in the Halloween spirit.

As far as costumes went, there were no ghosts or witches for me – I liked to be topical and unique. Here are two of the last Halloween costumes I had:

Patti Mayonnaise, a character from 90s TV show, Doug, which I loved.

On the bottom right you can see the “candy trade” I had with my university friends. “I’ll give you five lollipops for one Milky Way.” I always wanted any chocolate that had caramel in it, or Reese’s Pieces- an American chocolate with peanut butter inside, though they have special Halloween pumpkin versions 🙂

Misty, from Pokémon! :), with the help of my friend Matt, who was Brock.

In this picture, though you can’t see it too clearly, we are miming a common scene from the Pokémon show when Misty has to pull Brock away from girls:

Yep, I had orange hair for a couple days.

So we all know about the costumes and the candy and the phrase “trick-or-treat,” but Halloween has a history that would surprise some people. Here are some little-known facts from the History channel vid “Bet You Didn’t Know: Halloween”:

• Before Halloween was “Halloween,” it was a Celtic holiday called Samhain.

• The Celts were pagan, which means they believed in many gods. Samhain marked autumn changing into the dark days of winter. They believed that for one night, the door between the worlds of the living and the dead opened, and ghosts and spirits could walk among people.
• They had bonfires and threw old harvest crops in while they ate and had fun. It was a little bit like Čarodějnice in this way.

• People wore masks or dressed up (sometimes wearing animal heads and skins), trying to look like spirits themselves, so that the real ones wouldn’t bother them. They also left food and wine on their doorsteps to distract the spirits.
• Over time, Roman Catholics merged Samhain with November 2nd’s All Souls Day (along with a couple other holidays) in order to convert people to their religion.
• The night before this holiday was called All Hallows Eve –> Halloween. So believe it or not, we can thank Christianity for the beginnings of this holiday.

• Irish immigrants brought Halloween to the USA.
• The holiday as we know it today, with costumes and candy, started in the 1950s.
• Americans spend $6 billion on said costumes and candy every year.