Halloween a bit of history!!

The word “Halloween” has its origins in the Catholic Church. It comes from a contracted corruption of All Hallows Eve. All Hallows Day, or All Saint´s Day, November 1, is a Catholic day of observance in honor of the saints.
But in the 5th century BC, in Celtic Ireland, summer officially ended on October 31. The legend says that, on that day, the spirits of all those who had died throughout the preceding year would come back in search of living bodies to possess for the next year. Naturally, the still-living did not want to be possessed. So on the night of October 31, villagers would extinguish the fires in their homes to make them cold and undesirable. They would then dress up in all manner of ghoulish costumes and noisily parade around the neighbourhood, being as destructive as possible in order to frighten away spirits looking for bodies to possess.
The custom of Halloween was brought to America in the 1840´s by Irish immigrants. The custom of trick-or-treating is thought to have originated not with the Irish Celts, but with a ninth-century European custom called souling. On November 2, All Souls Days, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for “soul cakes”, made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars received, the more prayers they promised to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors.
The Jack-o-lantern custom probably comes from Irish folklore. As the tale is told, a man named Jack, who was notorious as a drunkard and trickster, tricked Satan into climbing a tree. Jack then carved an image of a cross on the tree trunk, trapping the devil up the tree. Jack made a deal with the devil: if he never tempted him again, he would let him down the tree.
According to the folk tale, after Jack died, he was denied entrance to Heaven because of his evil ways, but he was also denied access to Hell because he had tricked the devil. Instead, the devil gave him a single ember to light his way through the frigid darkness. The ember was placed inside a hollowed-out turnip to keep it glowing longer.
The Irish originally used turnips as their “Jack´s lanterns”. But when the immigrants came to America, they found that pumpkins were far more plentiful than turnips. So the jack-O-Lantern in America was a hollowed-out pumpkin, lit with an ember.-