In Norway people dress up in their "Halloween-kostymer". But they surely are not too familiar with history behind the party.
Halloween has history traces back to the Celtics in Ireland and their ancient religion. The Celtic people were pretty conscious of the spiritual world and created their own ideas of how they could access to it - such as by helping their more than 300 gods to crush their enemies in battle, or by doing imitations of the gods by showing cleverness and cunning skills.
The Celtics had two big feasts, in the beginning of summer they have Beltane (May 1), and in the end of summer they celebrate Samhain (Nov. 1). They truly believed that Samhain was a time when the split between the two worlds became very slim, and dangerous, supernatural troublemakers were active and spirits were free to wander wherever they felt like.
During this small period, the normal order of the universe was forgotten, and the natural and the supernatural gets its barriers temporarily removed, the side lies open and all unknown beings and the spirits of the dead wander freely among men and sometimes interfere violently, in their affairs.
Some Celtic priests carried out the rituals were called Druids, and were members of pagan orders in Britain, Ireland and Gaul. They generally performed their rituals with offering sacrifices, mostly of crops and animals, but even sometimes of humans, just in order to please the gods to ensure that the sun would return in the end of the winter and also frightening away evil spirits.
Norwegians dress up this day as ghosts, marvel-heroes, pirates and others. But, do the Norwegians know what really happened? I do not think so. When joining this private party at my friends I actually asked most of the participants joining the party if they knew the history of Halloween. In fact many did not know. Despite so many people connecting now with this tradition in Norway, this is fairly not as known as it should be.
I am very fascinated with these traditions, and would like more Norwegians to know about the history. I have made a web-page where I am including as much relevant information about the topic that I can find.
[http://www.halloween-kostymer.no/halloween-party/halloween-the-history]
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