The origins of Halloween are surprisingly slippery. Oct. 31 is next door to a Christian religious holiday, and it's around "harvest time," which might generally explain the date, but no one really knows why we put on costumes and beg for candy. There are a ton of theories describing how modern Halloween practices could have sprung from various ancient traditions, religious rites, or folk practices, but the first direct evidence of anything resembling modern "Halloween" is no older than the 1800s, and even then, it didn't really take off for another 100 years.
The most commonly repeated Halloween origin story says that the holiday began with the Samhain (pronounced sah-win or sow-in) celebrations of the Celts in Ireland, England, and Northern France. The date of Nov. 1 or Oct. 31 is about halfway between the autumnal equinox and winter solstice, and ninth century Irish literature describes gatherings and feasts marking Samhain, the day when ancient burial mounds were opened, and with them, portals to the Otherworld, the land of the Gods and the dead. Later, the theory goes, these practices were Christianized, renamed “All Hallow’s Day” and “All Hallow’s Eve” by the early Church, and that’s where we get Halloween. Sounds plausible enough...
Either way, both All Souls Day and Samhain likely have roots that go deeper than written history records. Harvest festivals were common in many places, and maybe they were like Halloween parties, but maybe they weren't. We don't know. The holiday takes place at the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter, a time between life and death, when both Pagan and Christian minds turn toward the inevitable end of things. Halloween traditions seem to pay homage to that "between" place, and while we don't know how much about how ancients celebrated "halfway between solstice and equinox day," it probably wasn't by dressing up and begging for treats.
Verified Halloween history
Another tradition of the time was baking “soul cakes” in memory of the dead. This led to “souling,” where groups of children traveled from house to house asking for cakes in exchange for praying for the dead. Later soulers would carry carved lanterns made of hollowed-out turnips too. Is this the origin of “trick or treating” and Jack o’ Lanterns? Maybe...but again, probably not. It doesn’t seem like souling children wore costumes, even though “guising” or “mumming” (dressing in costumes and bothering your neighbors for treats and/or money) was practiced in various places in Europe during other holidays, particularly around Christmas.
In colonial America, Halloween was not widely observed. While New England Puritans generally frowned on anything fun like wearing costumes, dancing with Death, or carving pumpkins, more liberal colonists in New York, Maryland, and further south may have brought some Halloween-like activities over the ocean from their villages in Germany or Ireland. We don't really know, but other than for a few pockets of diehards, maybe, celebrating Halloween wasn't a thing in either the U.S. or Europe before the late 1800s.
It wasn’t until the Irish mass immigration of the 19th century that we see Halloween celebrations labeled as such. Beginning around the 1850s, Irish immigrants fleeing the Potato Famine descended on the country. These immigrants brought Halloween celebrations to the U.S., but it doesn’t seem like they brought Halloween costumes or trick-or-treating.
The possible origins of trick-or-treating
Trick-or-treating is the most well-known expression of Halloween, but, despite historic examples of costume-clad holiday revelers and/or people going to door to door to beg for treats on holidays, there doesn't seem to be a direct link between any these older practices and modern trick or treating. Yes, it's a little like souling, but no one in America seems to have ever practiced souling. There's no evidence of anyone wearing costumes for Halloween in the U.S., the U.K., or Ireland before 1900 either, leading some Halloween scholars to suggest that American children developed trick-or-treating and costume-wearing independently of any older tradition. Which is actually the coolest theory: American kids made up Halloween from scratch.
From there, everything we call "Halloween" comes into focus: The ghosts, the parties, the scares, the candy, all evolving from comic strips, movies, candy company advertising campaigns, and regular folks who seem to really enjoy dressing up in costumes.
Halloween: The people's holiday
Many other major holidays are rooted in religion or meant to commemorate a specific historical event—they’re top-down holidays, where the Pope or the government decreed that everyone would get a day off on this specific date, and observe it in this specific way. But Halloween is the people's holiday, so there's no official list of rules telling us how we're supposed to commemorate it, or even any reason why we should be celebrating it. But every year we do anyway, perhaps due to a collective desire to get some candy or do something witchy before it gets too cold to go outside.
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