Kids Pumpkin Costume

The History of the Kids Pumpkin Costume

We all have fond childhood memories of the one night a year where we get to dress up like our favorite characters or wear mischievous costumes while we walked door-to-door to get candy from our neighbors.  Halloween, for some children, is one of the best nights of the year!  Did you know that America is not the only country that has a “Halloween” celebration?  In fact, it was not even one of the first.  The beginnings of the Halloween tradition started with an ancient Celtic ritual as part of their New Year’s celebration.

For the Celts, the end of the summer harvest marked the beginning of a cold time of winter in which many people wouldn’t make it to the next year.  (You have to remember that this was more than 2000 years ago!) They therefore believed that just before this period of time, the boundary that separated the world of the living and the world of the dead became blurred.  They thought that the ghosts of the dead might return to Earth to cause mischief, trouble, and damaged crops.

After the Romans conquered a large portion of Celtic land, several festivals were combined together each with their own traditional symbols, foods, and rituals.  One festival honored the Roman goddess of fruit and trees while even Christianity lent some influence with a time to honor saints and fallen martyrs.  All of these various celebrations were eventually combined to create what we now know to be Halloween.

The pumpkin was a traditional symbol of the fruits of the harvest and a bountiful and plentiful new year.  Some holiday historians say that jack-o’-lanterns were the result of faces carved into pumpkins to help ward off the evil spirits that might visit on the night of the dead.  Whatever the reason, pumpkins have become an almost international symbol of the period of time that we know as Halloween.  As much as green and red are associated with Christmas, orange, black, and gold, accentuated with green, make up the common colors for getting into the Halloween spirit.

Today, we keep that tradition alive by dressing up in a kids pumpkin costume and making scary or whimsical jack-o’-lanterns to decorate our porches and streets.  We even have candy to pass out to trick-or-treaters that is shaped like a pumpkin!  Even though there were many influences that created the Halloween holiday, just about everyone can find something they like about the joyful tradition!