Terrifying Halloween treats - Devil's eyeballs and Yummy Crummy Mummy recipes

Next Monday is All Hallows Eve, this is a great night in our neighborhood as all the kids go around trick or treating and this year as my kids are a little older now I decided to go all out and decorate the front of the house.

I have tombstones, skulls, spiders webs all around the garden, I have a skeleton hanging from the roof with a green strobe light on it-you name it-I got it. My wife says that I am doing this for me and not the kids and she is obviously right-as always. Now I have a week to go nuts and see what more stuff I can come up with, I am thinking about buying some bats...

Halloweens origins date back to a Celtic festival called Samhain (pronounced Sah-ween or Sow-in). The Celts celebrated the beginning of the New Year on November 1st. On the last evening of the year, October 31, they believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to the earth. These ghosts roamed the world, causing damage to crops and performing other mischief, as they searched for living bodies to possess.

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Not surprisingly, the living were not keen to have their bodies inhabited by these ghosts, so on that night, they would dress in scary costumes, and parade the town, hoping to frighten the spirits away, and make it to the morning unscathed.

After the Celtics lands were taken by the Romans, Samhain was absorbed with two Roman holidays. Feralia was a day in October to commemorate the passing of the dead.

Pomona was a day to celebrate the goddess of fruit and trees. (The symbol of Pomona was an apple, which may explain the adoption of the Halloween tradition of bobbing for apples.)

All Saints and All Souls

In the 7th century, in an attempt to replace substitute Samhain with a Christian holy day, the Catholic Church named November 1 as All Saint's Day, a day to honor saints and martyrs. The church tried again in the 9th century, making November 2 All Souls Day, a day when the living prayed for the souls of the dead. Neither attempt was very successful.

Trick-or-treating is said to have developed from the All Souls Day custom of people going village to village begging for "soul cakes" bread made with currants. The more cakes they received, the more prayers they would offer on behalf of the givers dead relatives who were in purgatory. However, some sources say that this tradition had all but disappeared long before the North American tradition of trick-or-treating began.

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Nster.com