DLC Blog

All Saint's Day

Today, Wednesday November 1st, is All Saint’s Day. While in modern times most of us spend today winding down from the excitement and nursing candy hangovers after Halloween, centuries ago All Saint’s Day was the day for celebration of the dead.

All Saint’s Day is the date of feast and celebration for the Christian Church’s known and unknown saints. The festival was instituted by Pope Boniface IV in the year 609, and during the Middle Ages was known as All Hallow’s Day in English. As you can guess, the day before was known as All Hallow’s Eve, which eventually was incorporated into a Celtic holiday and became known as Halloween.

Halloween and All Saint’s day are examples of how religious holidays often blended together with other cultural holidays over the centuries to create when and what we celebrate today. Although All Saint’s day was originally celebrated on May 13th, the date was changed to November 1st to be celebrated the day after Halloween, which people had come to associate with All Hallow’s Eve (even though they were originally two separate holidays celebrated by two separate cultures).

Centuries ago in Europe, it was believed that on Halloween witches and warlocks flew in the night, and huge bonfires were built to ward off these evil spirits. Children's pranks replaced witches' tricks in the 19th century, but most of the other Halloween customs are probably survivals from the Celtic festival.

To check out more on the origins of All Saint’s day, click here for DLC articles (make sure you're logged into the DLC before accessing these).

-Becca Lewis
Foreign Language and Humanities Student Mentor

Posted by Becca at November 1, 2006 04:35 PM in .