Samhain
By Michael Pearce

Samhain, celebrated on the 31st of October, is a genuinely ancient festival dating to the early medieval period in Ireland, parts of Wales, Scotland, and North-West England. In Ireland, traces of the event are still detected in the activities of children, who carve turnips into lanterns and light up their windows and gather candy in the American style on Halloween, which is mostly a family-friendly event for children, encouraged by adults who invest serious money into decorating their houses with comical graveyard ornaments and fake spiderwebs. 

20th-century interests in science fiction, fantasy, and horror movies slowed the degeneration of the festival into a Hallmark event exclusively designed for children’s indulgence in sugary treats, and today Halloween is an excellent opportunity for adults to over-indulge in alcoholic and smoky excess, to walk masked in the streets in the guise of favorite frightening characters from film and television, and to party into the night...

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