Today is the day when some cultures believed the Earthly plane and the plane of the dead are the most closely aligned thus allowing the year's easiest communication between the living and the dead.
People would dress up as their dead ancestors, not necessarily as witches or pirates or sexy cats unless that's what their dead relatives happened to have been, and would ask for offerings of food from each other. This custom came from the tradition of leaving offerings to the dead and evolved into giving candy to kids. The Trick Or Treat tradition represents the risk of accruing the wrath of your dead ancestors if you don't leave them an offering.
Christmas was once celebrated as the birth of Jesus, a religious leader to many of the world's population and like Halloween has been turned into something completely different. So much of the Western World's religious traditions have been streamlined, condensed and compressed into bite sized chunks for human consumption. Singing hymns came from chanting mantras used in meditation. Incense was originally used as something on which to concentrate while meditating and prayer was the watered down version of looking deep inside for answers through meditation. We kept a lot of the ritual while forgetting the reason behind it.
But enough of my Bah Humbuggery over Halloween. Here's The Tooners' spooky music video to help get the mood back:
Click above to view video.
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