RADIANT and beautiful October, whose changing color heralds the approach of winter, gives us our first autumn holiday, if Halloween can now be called a holiday.
Before the Christian era, in the days of the ancient Celts and their priests, the Druids, the eve of the first of November was the time for one of the three principal festivals of the year. The first of May was celebrated for the sowing; the solstice on the twenty-first of June for the ripening, and the eve of the first of November for the harvesting. At each of these festivals great fires were built on the hill-tops in honor of the sun, which the people worshipped. When Christianity took the place of the heathen religion, the Church, instead of forbidding the celebration of these days, gave them different meanings, and in this way the ancient harvest-festival of the Celts became All-Hallow-Eve, or the eve of All-Saints-Day, the first day of November having been dedicated to all of the saints.
Kaling.
For a long while most of the old customs of these holidays were retained; then, although new ceremonies were gradually introduced, Hallow-Eve remained the night of the year for wild, mysterious, and superstitious rites. Fairies and all supernatural beings were believed to be abroad at this time, and to exercise more than their usual power over earthly mortals. Because the fairy folk were believed to be so near us on Halloween, it was considered the best evening of the season for the practice of magic, and the customs observed on this night became mostly those of divination, by the aid of which it was thought the future might be read.
Before proceeding further with this subject we desire our readers to appreciate and fully understand that we are far from wishing to inculcate any superstitious belief in the power of charms to forecast future events; that we regard all fortune-telling as nonsense, pure and simple, and only insert it here, as we would any other game, for the sake of the amusement it affords. Although, to make our descriptions more intelligible, we announce the results of charms as facts, we would not have it understood that they are to be taken as such.
Nowadays, so practical has the world become, no fairy, witch, or geni could we conjure up, were we to practice all the charms and spells ever known to soothsayer or seer. Our busy, common-sense age allows no fairies to interfere with its concerns, and these creatures, who existed only in the belief of the people, must needs vanish, to return no more, when that belief is gone.
A few fortune-telling games are all that now remain of the weird ceremonies that once constituted the rites of Halloween, and the spirit of this old heathen holiday is once more changed, for it is now considered only an occasion for fun and frolic.
It was the custom for quite a number of years of some friends of the writer to give a Halloween party on each recurring Halloween; and merrier, jollier parties than those were, it would not be easy to devise. The home which opened wide its hospitable doors to the favored few on this night is a country-house, large and spacious; there is a basement under the whole lower floor, which is divided into kitchen, laundry, and various store-rooms intersected with passages, and this basement, deserted by the servants, was given up to the use of the Halloween revellers. The rooms and passage-ways were decorated with and lighted by Chinese lanterns, which produced a subdued glow in their immediate vicinity, but left mysterious shadows in nooks and corners.