Episode 5 - Halloween in the United States

Well, hello, and welcome to this episode of the Learn Everyday English Podcast, your road to English proficiency. You've come to the right place to improve your listening comprehension skills and mastery of the English language. Hi, my name is Gary and I will be your host today. I am a native English speaker born and raised in the United States and a retired engineer living in a small Texas town. I am also a language learner like you, so I know what it is like to learn a new and different language as I am studying Spanish. So now, let's jump right in to today's episode. Hi, well, hello, listeners, and welcome to episode five of the Learn Everyday English Podcast. I'm glad to have you with me, and again, my name is Gary. In this episode, we are going to talk about something I hope you will find very interesting, and that subject is Halloween in the United States. Hey, but before we get started, I want to remind you that you can follow me at my webpage. Just go to www.learneverydayenglish.com and you can find out what we're doing there. And at the webpage, you can find links to and listen to all the podcasts directly from the webpage. And for this podcast specifically, don't worry about trying to copy or write down information. Go to the podcast resources page on the Learn Everyday English website and click that link for podcast resource page, and there will be an outline or transcript of today's episode that you can just download and read and follow along with me. You can find the podcasts on all of the popular podcast applications like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Radio Public, and Cast Box. And finally, at the webpage, you can access a link that will take you to the Learn Everyday English YouTube channel, where you can watch many interesting and engaging videos to practice your listening comprehension and improve your English skills. So now, without further ado, let's jump right in to today's episode. Well, in today's episode, we're going to talk about the celebration called Halloween. That is a very popular celebration here in the United States. And one fact, or you can say tidbit of information, which is tidbit is just like a little fact or a little bit of something, did you know that one quarter of all the candy sold annually or every year in the United States is purchased for Halloween? Hmm, that's pretty interesting. There may be some new vocabulary words here in this episode that you may not know. So on the transcript that you can download from the Learn Everyday English webpage under the podcast resources page, the last page is a vocabulary list. And I will, as I go through today's episode, if there are some words I think that you may not know or might find difficult, I may go ahead and give you a brief explanation of what those words mean. But on the transcript, those words will be highlighted and underlined, and there will be a vocabulary list that you can refer to as you listen to the podcast. So we'll start right in. What is Halloween? It is a celebration that is celebrated in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, which is where it actually first began. And I think there are other countries around the world that have some sort of Halloween celebrations as well. But October 31st marks the observation of Halloween, which is the evening before all Hallows Day or all Saints Day, which is on November 1st. So on Halloween, people dress up in all kinds or types of costumes. They have Halloween parties. They visit haunted houses and trick-or-treaters walk up and down the streets looking for candy. So a haunted house is like an amusement attraction, we say in English, which is actually just a building, or it could be a series of rooms that are decorated to frighten or scare people as they walk through the attraction. And what are trick-or-treaters? On Halloween, there is a practice called trick-or-treat, where the children wear costumes and they walk from door to door or go house to house in a neighborhood. When they ring the doorbell or knock on the door and the owner opens the door, the children say trick-or-treat, which means, hey, give me a treat, which can be or, and usually is candy, or if not, I will play a trick on you. So that's what the word trick-or-treat means. So the kids that go around on Halloween asking for candy are called trick-or-treaters. So that's pretty interesting. That's something that you didn't know. What are Halloween's origin, or what is the origin of Halloween? Halloween actually began as a Celtic celebration, so most scholars agree that Halloween, as we know it today, started about 2,000 years ago when Celtic people in Europe, you know, they celebrated the end of the harvest or the crops that were ready, and the start of a new year in a festival called Sauen, and Sauen is sometimes also regarded as the Celtic New Year. So according to Celtic tradition, on the eve of Sauen, the doorway between the world of the living and the door of the dead became open, and because of this, the spirits of people who had died during the previous year could cross over, so the Celts believed the dead could appear and communicate with the living during this period. Hmm, that's kind of interesting. And sometimes they lit bonfires. So what is a bonfire? A bonfire is just a large, open fire that is used as part of a celebration. It's a kind of specific type of fire, or they carved lanterns out of vegetables such as squash to light the way for the good spirits. And in the United States, those lanterns would be carved out of pumpkins, also known as jack-o-lanterns, and we will talk about this specifically in more detail a little bit later in the episode. And finally there are also some accounts or stories of people making animal sacrifices to Celtic deities, and a deity is just another word for a god, and they were even dressed in costumes made of animal hides, and that's just another word for animal skins that are treated for human use, and they dressed in these animal hides to fool the evil spirits. So these days or today, Siwan is celebrated more as a harvest festival, but still uses many of the same rituals as found in the past. Next we're going to talk about the Christian influence on Halloween. So as Christianity spread throughout Europe, the Catholic Church tried to replace the old Siwan festival with its own traditions. So for example, the Church declared All Saints Day on November 1st, and this celebration was also known as All Hallows Day. October 31st, the day before All Hallows Day, became to be called All Hallows Eve, and this was later shortened to Halloween, so that's where we get the name Halloween from. And on Halloween, as I've mentioned before, children and even today, adults wear costumes, and the children go trick or treating, do you remember what that was? So Halloween costumes probably began with the Celts who dressed up like animals at the Siwan bonfires. In medieval England, people began to dress up like supernatural beings in the hope of frightening them away. And many people walked through town wearing costumes of fairies, witches, and ghosts. This practice was called mumming, and people would often give the mummers, which are the people that dressed up and went about mumming, they would give mummers food to eat and something to drink. But today, this attraction, or this tradition, turned into trick or treat, where adults give children candy, who if they get the treat, which is a candy, will hopefully not perform any malicious tricks. And malicious is just something that is showing a desire to cause harm to somebody. So malicious tricks are like harmful tricks. Next we're going to talk about Halloween as it evolved in the United States, and it started to take off, as we say in English, or to become more popular, in the 1800s. And why was that? Well, European immigrants brought their rituals and customs with them to the United States. And in the mid-1800s, nearly two million Irish immigrants who were fleeing the potato famine helped shape Halloween into an even more widely celebrated event. And a famine is just an event where there is a lack of food to eat. So the Irish popularized the celebration nationally with their new superstitions and customs like the jack-o-lantern. And did you know that jack-o-lanterns used to be carved out of turnips, potatoes, and sweets, whereas today they are carved out of pumpkins? And while kids didn't trick or treat like they do today, they did play plenty of pranks. And a prank is just a trick that is intended to be amusing and often to make someone look foolish. So the kids played plenty of pranks in the tradition of mischief making. And mischief is just playful misbehavior or trouble making, especially in children. I mentioned the word jack-o-lantern, and I'm going to talk about that a little bit later. But a jack-o-lantern is just a pumpkin that is carved into a specific type of thing. You might carve a face or design into a pumpkin. So that is called a jack-o-lantern. And you'll put a candle or light inside the pumpkin to illuminate it or light it up. So that is what a jack-o-lantern is. But Halloween eventually became a community, or sometimes we say a communal celebration. And by the 1900s, the focus of Halloween had shifted or moved or caused to be moved. So that's what shift means. The focus shifted from a religious holiday to a more communal or community type of celebration. As a reference to history, there was a practice called gizing, which was practiced and dated back to the Middle Ages, when the poor would go around asking for food or money. So this was borrowed from the English and Irish traditions, and children adopted this practice of gizing, and would dress up in costumes going door-to-door asking for food or money during Halloween. But nowadays, instead, parties were held and had a more festive atmosphere with colorful costumes. The frightening and superstitious aspects of Halloween had diminished, or become lessed or decreased, or lessened somewhat. And Halloween in the United States, and sometimes we just say the U.S. instead of United States, was slowly getting rid of, which means to remove something that you don't want anymore. So the U.S. was slowly getting rid of some of the old European traditions favoring more light-hearted celebrations. So what is exactly trick-or-treat? So despite the good nature of some people, Halloween pranks, to remember what a prank is, a trick that is intended to be amusing and often to make someone look foolish, and mischief, do you remember mischief, playful behavior or misbehavior, or trouble-making, especially in children, so pranks and mischief had become a huge problem here in the United States in the 1920s and the 1930s, mostly because the pranks often turned into vandalism, property damage and even physical assaults, so vandalism is, you are causing harm or damage to some type of thing, building property or car. The bad kids, and even organizations, used the Halloween time as an excuse to engage in types of criminal activity. So schools and communities did the best they could to prevent vandalism by encouraging the trick-or-treat concept. There's a very popular organization here in the United States called the Boy Scouts, although they have received bad publicity lately because of some bad things that have happened in the organization, but back then they were very popular organization. And the Boy Scouts got into the act of organizing safe events for children, like school carnivals, and local neighborhood trick-or-treat outings for children, hoping that this would make troublemakers go away, so a troublemaker is just a person that creates or causes trouble or makes trouble. But regardless, by the late 1930s, vandalism was decreasing as more and more children chose to participate in trick-or-treat instead of vandalizing. The earliest known print of the words trick-or-treat did not occur until 1934, when a Portland Oregon newspaper ran an article about Halloween pranks, kept local police officers on their toes. So to keep on your toes, or keep someone on their toes, is to cause someone to be alert and/or prepared to deal with the problem. There would be sporadic, and sporadic means something that happens occasionally, or at irregular intervals, so there would be sporadic instances of the phrase trick-or-treat used in the media during the 1930s, and eventually making its way onto Halloween cards. But the practice that we see today, where children dress in costume, going house to house saying trick-or-treat, did not really come about until the mid 1940s. So now you might be asking, "Hey, when was the first Halloween celebration in the United States?" Well, there's a city called Onoka in the state of Minnesota, and it is called the Halloween Capital of the World, and was the first city in the United States to officially hold a Halloween celebration in an effort to prevent kids from playing pranks, do you remember playing pranks means? Which means to carry out tricks, deceptions, or practical jokes on someone, but they would play pranks like tipping over outhouses and letting cows loose to run around Main Street. So to tip over means to fall over, or to cause something to fall over, so when you tip over something you can push something so that it falls over. But they would tip over outhouses, and an outhouse is a small structure separate from a main building which contains or covers a toilet or a place where you can go and use the bathroom. And they would let cows loose to run around on Main Street too, so to let loose means to free or to release from something. But the town also organized a parade and spent the weeks prior planning and making costumes, treats of popcorn, peanuts, and candy to any children who participated in the parade were made available, followed by a huge bonfire in the town square. The event grew over time and has been held every year since 1920, except the years 1942 and 1943, when the festivities were canceled due to World War II. But these days Anoka holds elaborate Halloween festivals with the parade, carnivals, costume contests, house decorating, and other community celebrations living up to its self-proclaimed title of "Halloween Capital of the World." So finally, what is Halloween like in the USA today, or in modern USA? Well, the popularity of Halloween has increased greatly year after year. Television movies and other media outlets have helped Halloween grow into the USA's second largest commercial holiday behind that of Christmas. I guess I bet you didn't know that, and I found that pretty interesting. Making horror movies and visiting haunted houses are popular, modern ways to celebrate the evening, and that's what people do today. A horror movie is a movie in which it is very frightening, scary, or unnatural, and highlights these types of things with the purpose often times to scare the viewer. Sometimes you might hear a terror movie, but horror movie is the most common way to describe these types of movies. Many people create or make jack-o-lanterns, which are made by carving faces or designs into a pumpkin, then placing a candle or light inside the pumpkin to light up the carving. But the biggest challenge facing today's 38 million trick-or-treaters is staying safe in a world where the criminal types use Halloween as an excuse to act on deviant behavior, and deviant means that is used to describe a person or behavior that is not usual and is generally considered to be unacceptable. Many school and local communities will organize trick-or-treating in shopping malls, especially in neighborhoods where gang activity is present or prevalent. Prevalent means that it is very common, or occurs a lot. But trick-or-treating skyrocketed, and skyrocket means to cause or rise or increase suddenly and very rapidly, or to go up very quickly. So trick-or-treating skyrocketed in popularity by the 1950s, when Halloween became a true national event. So today, over 179 million people celebrate the holiday, and spend about $9.1 billion, again $9.1 billion on Halloween every year, according to the National Retail Federation. But people in the United States love Halloween wholeheartedly, and wholeheartedly means completely and sincerely devoted, determined, or enthusiastic about something, or with all of one's heart. So I can say, I wholeheartedly produce these Learn Everyday English podcasts, because it is something that I love and really like to do. But people in the U.S. love Halloween wholeheartedly, but the day actually isn't an official holiday here in the U.S. Despite all of the festivities and parties and trick-or-treating that happen in the evening, Halloween is still a working day, and most businesses and banks have to follow their regular working hours. I'll close by telling you my experience of Halloween. I was born in 1962, so I may be a little bit older than a lot of you. I'm 58 years old now, but I remember when I was a kid, Halloween was a very fun time. I have a twin brother, so we would dress up in costumes. We would usually have a different costume every year, and kids would start off celebrating Halloween. We would trick-or-treat, or go door-to-door, and ask for and receive candy. And we'd come home with a big paper bag full of candy that we would eat throughout the next coming weeks, because my mother wouldn't let us eat all the candy at one time. But we would have a costume or a different costume every year, and we did that probably when we were maybe like, started four or five years old, and maybe until we were about 10, 11 years old. And I remember it just being a very fun time. So I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Learn Every Day English podcast about Halloween in the United States, and that you learned something new, learned something interesting, maybe learned some new vocabulary words, and again, like I say, don't try to write down or remember everything that was talked about. You can download the transcript or notes from this episode if you just go to the Learn Every Day English webpage, then click on the link that will take you to the podcast resource page. Go to episode five, and there you will find the transcript for today's episode that you can download and follow along. So I would love to hear from you and what you thought of this episode. Hey, if you have any questions for me, and/or if you have any suggestions for specific topics you would like me to discuss on this program, hey, just let me know. Again, go to the Learn Every Day English homepage, and at the bottom there will be a contact form that you can fill out, and let me know your comments there. Well I think that's it for now, and be sure to check out our upcoming podcast, and thanks for listening, and goodbye.