Halloween

Halloween,or Hallowe'en,is a holiday celebrated on night of October 31.Traditional activities include trick-or-treating, bonfires, costume parties, visiting "haunted houses" and carving jack-o-lanterns. The term Halloween (and its alternative rendering Hallowe'en) is shortened from All-hallow-even, as it is the eve of "All Hallows' Day",[1] which is now also known as All Saints' Day. Some modern Halloween traditions developed out of older pagan traditions, especially surrounding the Irish holiday Samhain, a day associated both with the harvest and otherworldly spirits. Irish and Scottish immigrants carried versions of the tradition to North America in the nineteenth century. Other western countries embraced the holiday in the late twentieth century. Halloween is now celebrated in several parts of the Western world, most commonly in Ireland, the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, and the United Kingdom and occasionally in parts of Australia and New Zealand.
Many European cultural traditions, in particular Celtic cultures, hold that Halloween is one of the liminal times of the year when spirits can make contact with the physical world, and when magic is most potent (according to, for example, Catalan mythology about witches and Scottish and Irish tales of the Sídhe).

From:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween

costume n.服裝
haunt v.經常去(某地);纏住(某人)
jack n.插座
alternative adj.若干中擇一的;供選擇的
render v.翻譯;使成為;給予
pagan n.非基督教徒
spirit n. 心靈
otherworldly adj.空想的;來世的
immigrant n.移民
version+(of) n.說法

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When the Halloween is coming, my neighbors who come from America will decorate their house with some things like: punkin, death’s-head, bat…and so on. But they had not come to us house, and say: Trick or treating! It’s interesting to us because we do not have the festival. And it seem important to every westerner. The date of the Halloween is soon coming. So I want to realize it much by this time.

From the article, I know the rise of the Halloween Day which was from pagan traditions. It’s amazing to me because it is now celebrated by western world. Why I am interest in Halloween because the punkins are really cute. And the supermarket would sell that in Taiwan. One year my brother had some program about the festival in his school. Culture is learned around the world. It’s interesting and meaningful to everyone.