Honors4Diversity (H4D) hosted a midterm destressing event where honors students could paint plastic pumpkins and quickly learn some non-academic history about Halloween on Thursday, Oct. 16.
There were white plastic pumpkins and painting materials being distributed on paper plates, as well as cups next to a jug of apple cider and donuts. The H4D e-board noted that this event had more attendance than expected, so they didn’t have supplies — especially pumpkins — for everyone.
Anushka Jain, a seventh-semester physiology and neurobiology and English double major and co-president of H4D said that planning this event didn’t take much and credited her colleagues on the executive board.
“We were all able to sit virtually and we knew we wanted to do an event where we can destress from midterms,” she said. “We wanted to focus more on religious diversity [with this event]. We’ve done events on cultural diversity before; we wanted to focus on how festivals and holidays are celebrated across the world.”
The slides started with the history of the Celtic ritual that predated and inspired Halloween, Samhain. The festival, typically observed on Nov. 1, celebrates and ushers in the transition from fall to winter. This night entailed eating sweets, lighting a bonfire and wearing costumes to ward off evil spirits and entities.
The early Christians tried to convert Samhain into a Christian holiday. In response to Samhain, Pope Gregory III declared Nov. 1 All Saints’ Day to celebrate the Christian martyrs and saints. All Saints’ Day then became All Hallows’ Day and the day before it, Oct. 31, subsequently became All Hallows’ Eve. The latter eventually became the Halloween we know today.
Despite the Christian rule, some people in Europe continued practicing Pagan rituals. Some of the rituals even became syncretic, or merged with other religious practices as a way of adapting to different cultures and environments, with Christian practices.
There is an ongoing debate within Christian communities on whether or not followers of the religion are allowed to celebrate Halloween. As a result, some Christians participate in the holiday, but other sects, as well as some followers of religions that aren’t Christianity, do not view Halloween as a secular holiday due to its Pagan history. These followers do not observe Halloween due to their own religious obligations and unwillingness to observe an originally spiritual and religious holiday created by the Pagans.
The next slide showed a picture of a carved turnip from Donegal, Ireland. Europeans would hollow out the insides and place candles in these turnips to ward off evil spirits. In the United States, pumpkins were used instead, creating what would be known as the jack o’ lantern.
There was a slide attempting to explain the history of trick or treating. There were three main theories: in the Celtic Samhain, people would leave food out for the spirits traveling in the night; Scottish children and poor adults would go to local homes and collect food — and sometimes also money — for the Christian All Souls’ Day on Nov. 2, or a German-American Christmas tradition called “Belsnickeling,” where kids would dress up and ask the neighbors to guess who their costume was based on.
There was also another slide on international Halloween traditions. In Mexico, the holiday is known as “Día de las Brujas” or “Day of the Witches,” but Día de los Muertos (or Day of the Dead) eclipses it. In Japan, Halloween has been majorly influenced by the country’s pop culture. In Ireland, where Halloween technically originated from, there are Halloween festivals along with the trick or treating and costumes.
Connor Farley, a seventh-semester chemistry major, said, “I thought it was very insightful. I didn’t know much about the origin of Halloween before that.” When asked what he was painting on his pumpkin, which he’d painted a dark blue color, Farley said, “You know that painting with the ‘scream’ person? I’m taking inspiration [from] that” in reference to the classic and famous painting “The Scream” by artist Edvard Munch.
Asher Bravo, a third-semester psychological sciences major, wanted to paint the character “Chiikawa” from the manga of the same name, but didn’t have a pumpkin to paint it on. He was going to paint Chiikawa on a cup as a consolation, but a good Samaritan gave him their pumpkin so that he could complete his mission.
When asked about the contents of the presentation, Bravo said, “I like to learn things like that. If I wasn’t already psych, I would do history as a major.” He continued, “I liked when they were talking about the progression of it from Celtic to Christian.”
When asked about future H4D events, Jain said, “We’re going to be doing something for Día de los Muertos with MIXED,” a club at UConn that aims to support multiracial and transracial adoptee students and help them accept all parts of their identity. She added that “In the spring semester the big thing is International Night,” an event where students can share their cultures in interactive ways to celebrate the diversity on campus.