Trick or treat? It’s Halloween today!
By the way, did you know that Halloween is a Celtic festival?
Halloween is a Celtic festival which was born in Europe. It was also celebrated in France, Italy, Swtizerland, Germany, Austria, north of Spain, England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, all the countries where the Celts lived. In Ireland Halloween has always been very important and when many Irish people emigrated to the USA in the 1800s because of a terrible famine, they brought their traditions with them to America. The Americans in the States particularly liked the festivity and that is why this European festival is so famous in America too! The Irish used to lit candles in carved turnips to scare the evil spirits away on the night of Halloween but when they went to America they couldn’t find any turnips. However, they found some vegetables that were even better: pumpkins! There are many stories about Halloween, one that many children know is the story of Jack o’ Lantern, which also gave the name to the spooky Halloween lanterns!
Now, you’ve probably been asking: “who were the Celts and why is the festival associated to spooky and eerie things?”
The Iron Age Celts lived in Britain from around 750 BCE to 12 CE. They were the most powerful people in central and northern Europe. There were many groups (clans or tribes) of Celts around Europe.
The Celts believed that the world of the living and the world of the dead could meet during the night of 31st October. It was a night when the spirits of the Otherworld could return to Earth and roam through the villages until dawn. You could meet good spirits but also bad ones. If you didn’t want to be caught by these spirits, you had to dress up like them. That night was called the night of Samhain, which changed its name in All Hallows’ Eve in the Middle Ages and then became Halloween! Hallow is a word in Medieval English meaning Saint: the name All Hallow’s Eve means in fact “the eve of all Saints”. Halloween, or Samhain, was in fact an important festival celebrated by the Celts and it was a moment to celebrate the end of the year (New Year’s Eve) and the beginning of a new one. Everybody celebrated the end of summer and the arrival of winter and ate, sang and danced. There were also religious ceremonies like weddings or rites or purification, and in each village a sacred bonfire was lit.
The ancient Celts divided the year into two halves, the lighter half and the darker half, and held four celebrations (also known as Fire Festivals) to mark the changing seasons:
• Imbolc – celebrated halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox (1st February)
• Beltane – halfway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice (1st May)
• Lughnasadh – halfway between the summer solstice and fall equinox (1st August)
• Samhain – halfway between the fall equinox and winter solstice (1st November)
Of these four sacred times, Samhain was perhaps the most significant as it is thought to have represented the Celtic New Year. For the ancient Celts, time began in darkness, with each 24-hour day commencing at dusk. At the same time, the new year began with the arrival of darkness (winter). Ushering in the darker half of the year, Samhain represented the end of one year and the beginning of the next.
Before we go trick-or-treating, here are some fun facts about Halloween!
Samhain is also the modern Irish word for the month of November.
The colours of Halloween are orange and black. Orange represents the harvest (the fruit and vegetables harvested at the end of summer) and black represents death.
Some popular activities of Halloween include: the game bobbing for apples, going from house to house in costumes to ask for candies (and to play a trick to the owner of the house if you don’t get anything), divination games and telling ghost stories or watching horror films.
Many elements of fairy tales, fantasy stories and fables come from Celtic myths and folklore.
Put on your costume and let’s carve a pumpkin, it’s time to party! Happy spooky Halloween!
Autumn has arrived
It’s October now and we’re in Autumn.
The days are shorter and colder. It’s also started to rain. We’re going to school and summer is over. It really looks sad, but autumn is great fun too! There are a lot of nice activities to do!
What can you do in autumn?
Well, in autumn you can do a lot of funny things: for example, you can go leaf-peeping! To peep is to look, and a leaf is the flat part of a plant growing on a branch. Some leaves turn red, orange or yellow in autumn and the landscape becomes wonderful! When you go leaf-peeping, you walk in the woods and look at the bright colours of the leaves.
You can also look for chestnuts or mushrooms and then you can make some delicious food.
What can you make with chestnuts?
You can bake a cake, or you can cook chestnuts with milk, or… you can roast them! Roasted chestnuts on the fire are delicious and fun! When the chestnuts get too hot, they pop!
Mushrooms are excellent too! Have you tried fried mushrooms? Or mushroom risotto? Yummy!
There is also another important vegetable in autumn: the pumpkin. Pumpkins are small or large, round or long, orange or yellow, and there are so many types! With pumpkins you can make pumpkin soup, pumpkin pie and you can carve them to create a Jack-o-Lantern for Halloween!
Next time, we’re going to talk about Halloween, but now let’s go into the kitchen! We need to cook all this delicious food!
It rains a lot in Britain, doesn’t it?
So, it’s quite normal in English to have many different ways to describe the rain.
We may have drizzle if the rain is very light, or a shower if it is a short period of rain, a downpour if it is heavy rain or we can say that it is raining cats and dogs if it is really raining a lot.
If you live in a very hot area, you may not have as many names for the rain as the English language does.
This is in fact how languages work. The people who speak a specific language contribute in inventing new words for things they see very often that maybe others don’t know.
In the past, the Latin language had no words for the colours brown, green or grey. These words entered the Latin vocabulary when the Romans came into contact with tribes from the North, the Celts, or the Germanic peoples, who lived in areas with a higher percentage of woods and forests who, for this reason, had words to describe colours they used to see every day while the Romans didn’t. Names of trees such as birch and beech were new for the Romans who had never seen those plants in the south of Italy before. For the same reason, the word pants entered the Latin vocabulary because of the Celts, who actually used pants or trousers which were completely unknown to the Romans who were more used to wearing togas.
These were all examples of how different places, with specific colours, plants or animals shaped some languages; but now let’s step back in time even further and let’s go to prehistoric times.
There is a theory in Linguistic Anthropology which differentiates language sounds according to space. Have you ever noticed why some Latin languages such as Italian, French, Spanish or Romanian contain several vowels, while languages such as Swedish, German, English or Dutch contain many consonants? Here is the reason why. Try to say out loud the sound “ah” and try to keep the sound as long as you have breath, like this: “aaaaah”. Now, try to do the same with this sounds: “tch”, “p”, “t”. How long were you able to maintain these sounds? Probably for just about a second. Vowels are sounds you can keep saying for a long time, while consonants are explosive sounds which cannot be prolonged in time. People who lived in very hot areas, such as the Mediterranean, needed sounds that could be prolonged in time, so that if your companion was very far from you, he or she could understand you better. The same happened for some languages of peoples living in the Amazon forest or on the Pacific islands. All their languages contained a lot of vowels because the speakers needed sounds that could be prolonged in time so that if they were hunting or very far from one another, they could use words which could actually be shouted for a long period, and be sure that everybody would understand or hear them.
On the contrary, in very cold areas such as Scandinavia for instance, people stayed closer to one another because they needed warmth. For this reason, there was no need to have sounds that had to be prolonged in time, so short sounds such as consonants were more useful. If you live in Italy and speak or know dialects, you may find the same thing: in the North of Italy, near the Alps or in the mountains, people speak dialects with a higher quantity of consonants than people living in the centre or the south of Italy, who use a larger quantity of vowels instead. It is in fact normal to hear a difference in sound between people living in cold places (who tend to have a lower volume of voice) and people living in hotter places (who tend to have a higher volume of voice). All these things happened a long time ago, but these features are still present in today’s languages. But there’s even more to it!
In very small communities of Aboriginal peoples in Australia or Native Americans in the States, it is often very common to find languages where the concept of right and left or north, south, east or west is totally absent. Some of these languages rely on different cardinal points. For example, if you live near a very big mountain you consider to be sacred, you may use it to say over the mountain or below the mountain and that is all you need to say! How crazy languages can be at times!