Trick or treat! Welcome back to the Learn English Podcast, the podcast teaching English in context so you can learn naturally.
My name is Dr. C and on today's episode, we will be celebrating Halloween.
Halloween is a popular holiday here in the United States that is celebrated on the 31st of October.
That makes today Halloween!
Because it is a popular holiday and is tied to American culture, I wanted to discuss a little bit about the history of Halloween as well as some popular traditions that are tied to the holiday.
So to start off a little bit about Halloween, Halloween is a mixture of Celtic traditions, Roman traditions, and Christian traditions.
All three combined to create what we now call Halloween.
But the original holiday dates back about 2000 years to an original Celtic celebration.
They believed that the 31st of October was the night where the line between the living and the dead became blurred.
So they believed that it was the night that the spirits could come back to the earth and roam around the earth.
So to try to help protect from these spirits and ward off these spirits, they dressed up in costumes and had bonfires.
Eventually when the Romans came in and the Christians came in, this holiday got melded into other holidays.
There was an All Saints Day that was declared to be November 1st that was going to be celebrating the Christian saints.
That was also called All Hallows Day, which made Halloween All Hallows Eve, which eventually became Halloween.
In the United States, Halloween, like I said, is very popular.
There are some key things that you do to celebrate Halloween if you live here.
The first is that you dress up in costume.
So if you are a child or if you have children, young children especially, they usually go to school in their costume.
It's a very big deal of determining what you're going to be for Halloween and to dress up for whatever that is and celebrate with your friends at school.
Sometimes there's even celebrations at school like a parade of all the different costumes.
When you get older, when the children get older, the amount of children dressing up becomes less and less.
I teach high school and I would say less than half actually dress up, but there still are some that dress up in high school and every year there's a competition at lunch between the people who dressed up and there's a vote to say who has the best costume and that's always pretty fun.
People like going to that and seeing who won for the costume of the year that year.
For adults, that costume tradition still continues on.
If you're going to a Halloween party, you're going to dress up as something.
Usually when it comes to women or at least I can say traditionally when it comes to women, this is when you get the sexy costumes like sexy nurse, sexy police officer.
There's been some pushback about this in recent years that it's misogynistic, that it degrades women, but those costumes still exist.
In general, the most popular costumes usually have to do with some kind of cultural reference of something big that happened that year.
And as long as you have a costume, really, you can go to a party and be just fine.
I do dress up very simply when I go and teach during Halloween.
So I will show up on Halloween in my costume.
If you're watching on YouTube, you will actually see my costume in the thumbnail.
So if you know what that is, leave it in the comments section below.
Tell me what you think my costume is.
Again, it's very simple, but I do it every year because it's fun.
The second thing about Halloween is that it involves candy, lots and lots and lots of candy.
When you live in the United States, if you go to a grocery store or a Target, a Walmart, any time near October.
So I'm saying even September, maybe even the beginning of August, you will start seeing candy in the store.
Candy is everywhere.
When you are a child, again, if you have young children, they will bring candy to school.
They exchange candy with their friends.
Candy is like the center of the world when it comes to Halloween and children.
Now, the candy thing and having to buy candy and give candy is tied to our third tradition, which is trick or treating.
Trick or treating is hugely popular.
If you have seen TV shows or movies that have shown Halloween and shown what this looks like, for example, if you were a fan of Marvel, there was an episode of WandaVision that involved Halloween and showed her kids trick or treating around the neighborhood.
That's real. I've had people, I've had students ask me, like, do people actually do that in the United States?
Yes. When I was a child, I did that every year.
I went out with my mom, with my cousins.
We would take a bag.
Some type of bag, some type of basket, it depends really what you have available.
Some people even use a pillowcase and they just take the pillowcase and walk around with that.
But you walk around in your costume.
You go to people's doors.
You knock on the door and when they answer the door, you say trick or treat.
When you say that they're supposed to give you candy or at least you're hoping that they give you candy, some people will try to give healthier options.
I think there was a dentist that was in one of my cousins' neighborhood who would give out toothbrushes and toothpaste.
But don't be that house.
If you are here in the United States, if you have trick or treaters coming to your house, give candy out.
You can give the little tiny, fun sized candy, which are small.
If you want to be the popular house, you can be the house that has the full size candy bars and people will want to go there.
But it definitely is a tradition to do.
I will say, though, that in recent years, trick or treating has not fallen out of favor.
People still trick or treat, but maybe not as much as before is when I was a kid.
So when I was young, there was people everywhere.
If you went out on Halloween, there were kids and families everywhere.
And it's still like that in certain areas, certain neighborhoods that have a lot of children, certain neighborhoods that decorate a lot for Halloween.
We'll get a big turnout.
But there's also been the rise of smaller trick or treating sites.
For example, some schools or churches or libraries will have a Halloween trick or treating in the parking lot.
And parents still bring their kids, their kids still dress up.
They still go trick or treating, but they do it within the school or within the church, for example, in the parking lot or within the building.
And this is because there is some fear around trick or treating.
Every year, sadly, there are people who get hurt during Halloween.
People usually go trick or treating when it's dark.
And so when you have a bunch of people walking around and you have cars and it's dark, there can be accidents.
And sadly, that does happen.
So that's one element of danger.
The second element of danger is that now in modern times, people are a little bit wary.
People are a little bit scared of having their children go to strangers doors and knock on the door and get food from a stranger.
So there's always a little bit of fear every year that the candy might not be safe to eat.
That's always a rumor that's going around.
I personally don't know if there's ever been an actual story, something that's actually true, that candy was tainted in some way or not safe.
But every year, the news always kind of projects that it's a possibility that maybe your kid will get sick from having candy that's given to them by a stranger.
So schools or churches will have these events where it's considered to be safer.
Your kid isn't walking around on the street.
They're not going to get hit by a car.
They're going to get candy from a source that's more regulated and it's just supposed to be overall safer.
Now, again, people still do go trick or treating.
It is still very popular, but I've just noticed in my neighborhood, I don't get any trick or treaters who come around.
There's not really any young kids that live in my neighborhood.
So that might be one reason.
But compared to when I was younger, the amount of people that go trick or treating is just less and less, especially after the pandemic.
So if you're in the United States, you might see these little trick or treating events at like a school, like I said, or somewhere else.
You might see them because they are getting more popular.
And our last tradition is decorating your front yard.
Now decorating your front yard is again tied to the Celtic tradition, dating back to the original meaning of Halloween.
The Celtic tradition usually involved carving faces into potatoes or turnips to scare away the bad spirits on Halloween.
That got translated over here to the United States into carving pumpkins, which are called jack -o'-lanterns.
But it also involves pretty much any decoration you want nowadays.
If you live in a neighborhood that really celebrates Halloween, you will see almost anything on front yards.
There are spiders and spiderwebs, ghosts, spooky monsters, inflatable balloons, jack -o'-lanterns, skeletons, anything, anything and everything.
The neighborhood where I work goes pretty hard, we would say.
It goes all out on Halloween and all of the neighbors have different decorations in their front yard.
And it's really fun.
It's really a fun way to get into the Halloween spirit.
And here in the United States, it is a way to say that you are celebrating Halloween.
So if you are one of the people that celebrates Halloween and has candy for trick or treaters, having the decorations in your front yard is a way to signal to people to come to your house to get candy.
If you are not celebrating Halloween, if you do not have candy for trick or treaters, what you are supposed to do is turn off your lights and do not have any decorations in your front yard.
Make sure that your house is as plain as possible so that way people who are trick or treating know to just keep walking and go to the next house and that you don't have candy so they don't waste your time, and they don't ring your doorbell and bother you.
If you are celebrating though, you can put whatever decorations you want.
You can even carve a jack -o'-lantern.
I can say from personal experience, I have carved a jack -o'-lantern.
I used to do it when I was a kid with my mom.
If you're here in the United States during Halloween time and you go to a grocery store or a store like a Target or Walmart, in the Halloween section, you will usually find Halloween kits.
And those kits are for when you buy a pumpkin.
They usually include a scooper of some sort because with a jack -o'-lantern, you want to scoop out the inside of the pumpkin.
It has a little carving tool so you can carve the outside of the pumpkin and a design so you can get whatever design you want.
Traditionally, like I said, they were faces and you will still find spooky scary faces, but there's also ghosts and cats and monsters.
I've even seen some really beautiful jack -o'-lanterns that are very intricate, very highly detailed.
So for example, like a fire breathing dragon or something that just took all this time to make and they look very beautiful.
So after you do your design, what you're supposed to do is put a light in the pumpkin and then it illuminates the design and you put it on your front porch.
If you are here in the United States or if you've done a jack -o'-lantern before, let me know how it came out, what designs you like to do.
I personally, I've done them, but they are always very challenging, at least for me because I was a kid.
So I have not done anything that's very intricate or beautiful, and I haven't done them in a long time, but they are fun, especially if you have kids.
It is definitely something fun you could do with them.
Well, I hope you liked this episode about Halloween.
If you are in the United States, celebrate Halloween.
Go to a party, go to an event, go trick -or -treating with your kids or have candy so you can give out candy to other trick -or -treaters.
It definitely is a fun holiday.
It has a spooky and scary elements, but it also is a lot of fun to dress up in costume and celebrate with people around you.
I hope that you learned something about the Halloween culture here and that you learned some new English words or phrases.
If you are watching on YouTube, please leave a comment in the comment section below.
Let me know how you celebrate Halloween and what you like to do on October 31st.
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Like and subscribe so you don't miss our episode when it comes out next week.
And until then, keep learning English.
