The Meaning of Halloween

What the word means

"Halloween" comes from "All Hallows' Eve". "Hallow" is an older English word for a saint or holy person, so All Hallows' Day is All Saints' Day and its eve is the evening of 31 October. The contraction into a single word happened gradually in Scots and English usage over several centuries.

That etymology already contains the essential point: Halloween is not an independent invention but the evening before something else. Its meaning has always been defined by the boundary it stands on.

The idea of a threshold

Nearly every interpretation of Halloween, historical or modern, returns to the notion of a threshold. The harvest is finished and winter has not yet arrived. The daylight collapses. In older agrarian societies this was a genuine turning point in the working year, not a symbolic one.

The Celtic festival of Samhain, celebrated around the same time, marked exactly this transition. Popular accounts claim that the boundary between the living and the dead was believed to thin on that night. The historical evidence is thinner than the retellings suggest, but the underlying structure — a moment between two seasons, treated as unusual — is well attested across European folk calendars.

The Christian layer

In the eighth and ninth centuries the Western church fixed All Saints' Day to 1 November, followed by All Souls' Day on 2 November. Together these days form a period dedicated to remembering the dead: the saints first, then everyone else.

Halloween therefore sits directly in front of a genuinely solemn observance. In Austria this is still visible. Cemeteries are tended in the last week of October, graves are decorated, and families gather on 1 November. The contrast between the playful evening and the quiet holiday is not a contradiction; it is the historical structure of the season.

What the classic symbols stand for

• Jack o'lantern: a carved pumpkin with a light inside, derived from Irish turnip lanterns and the legend of Stingy Jack. It signals welcome and, in folklore, wards off unwanted visitors.
• Costumes and masks: originally a way of not being recognised on a night when the ordinary rules were suspended; today a form of creative play.
• Ghosts and skeletons: direct references to the season of remembering the dead, rendered harmless through humour.
• Bats, spiders and black cats: animals associated with darkness and with old superstition; largely decorative today.
• Autumn produce: pumpkins, apples, nuts and maize are harvest symbols, and they are the honest core of the season's imagery.

What Halloween means today

For most families in Austria, Halloween now means three practical things: an excuse for children to dress up, a reason to decorate the house warmly at the darkest point of autumn, and an evening of contact with neighbours that would not otherwise happen.

That last function is easy to underestimate. Trick-or-treating is one of the very few remaining occasions on which children knock on the doors of people who live nearby. In urban environments especially, this creates a small but real moment of neighbourhood life.

The criticism, taken seriously

Halloween is regularly criticised in Austria as an imported, commercialised event that sits awkwardly next to All Saints' Day. The criticism deserves a fair hearing rather than a dismissal. Halloween in its current form did arrive via American popular culture in the 1990s, and a considerable part of the market around it is straightforwardly commercial.

The counterargument is equally reasonable: the underlying elements — lanterns, harvest imagery, costumed visits between houses, seasonal remembrance — have deep European roots, including in Alpine folk customs. A version of Halloween that emphasises craft, food and neighbourliness rather than plastic horror props sits comfortably in an Austrian autumn.

Explaining Halloween to children

For young children, the most useful explanation is simple and calm: at the end of autumn, when the evenings get dark, people light lanterns, dress up and visit each other. The next day is a quiet day for remembering people who have died.

This framing avoids both the horror-film register and any implication that Halloween is a competitor to All Saints' Day. It also gives children a straightforward answer when they are asked at school what Halloween actually is.