As anyone who's been to
Walmart lately has noticed, Halloween is coming up. While a lot of
people-children and adults alike-consider the holiday to be a lot of
fun, others approach it with fear. I'm not talking about ghosts or
spiders or things like that, although those can be scary too. No, I'm
talking about the many misconceptions and urban legends going around
about things that go on that would make any parent more cautious to
allow their children to participate. Some of the legends are
practical and based on truth, but others are simply fables. Some make
sense, but others are just plain weird. In this post, I'm going to
attempt to separate fact and fiction.
-Halloween is based
on a Satanic holiday. No. It's actually based on a Celtic
festival called Samhain (pronounced sow-een). In their time,
November 1 was observed as the end of summer, the final harvest
before the long and cold winter came. October 31, essentially 'New
Year's Eve', was a day when the line between the living and the dead
was seen as being 'thinner' and was observed as a day to honor the
dead. While some legends did include spirits coming back from
the dead and causing trouble, Satan had nothing to do with it. Even
if the holiday did
have questionable beginnings, though, the secular American
celebrations have evolved well beyond that. Like Christmas, it's
become a 'Hershey' or 'Hallmark' holiday-in other words, it's so
commercialized now that someone would have to go to a lot of effort
to bring back any of the original meanings of the celebration.
Holidays, like a lot of other things in life, are what we make of
them.
-Razor blades in
apples. While such unfortunate
incidents have occurred, they are nowhere near as widespread as the stories would have you believe. Furthermore, they are usually more in the 'let's
scare my little brother' vein than the 'evil stranger' one. There was
one incident in 2000 where a man put needles in the Snickers bars he
handed out, but no one needed medical attention. Aside from that,
most stories involving candy tampered with in this way were either
hoaxes altogether or the result of the type of stupid pranks common
on Halloween.
As
for poisonings, most cases have been found to be either hoaxes or an
intent by an adult to harm a particular person. For instance, there
was one case in 1974 when an 8-year old died after eating
cyanide-laced Pixie Stix, but
the poison came from his own father in an attempt to collect the life
insurance rather than the random workings of a madman. Even
so, it's still a good idea to check your kids' candy to be sure
everything is okay.
-Strangers have been
known to lure children into their houses so they can make them their
personal slaves. This is just
my silly way of saying that your children should stay on the porch
rather than going inside the house of anyone they don't know.
There
are quite a few more urban legends involving Halloween, but
Snopes.com
tells the rest of them much better than I can. Have fun and be safe!
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