From our family to yours, Our entire team at Atlantic Sweeping & Cleaning hopes you have a wonderful Halloween! Halloween is an interesting holiday, an amalgam of various culutures and beliefs that evolved into the holiday we celebrate today.

The origins of Halloween are widely believed to have originated about two thousand years ago with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain. The Celtic New Year was celebrated on November first. This day was intended to mark the official end of summer and the beginning of the long cold winter months. Celtic tradition held that during this time, the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead would become thin, allowing the spirits of the dead to return to earth. The Celtic peoples built large bonfires and wore costumes to celebrate this occasion.

By 43 A.D., The Roman Empire had mostly conquered the Celtic lands. During the ensuing four hundred years of Roman rule, two prominent Roman traditions were absorbed into the traditional Celtic festival. The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple, and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably explains the modern tradition of bobbing for apples.

By the 9th century, the influence of Christianity had spread widely into Celtic lands, where it gradually blended with and supplanted older Celtic traditions and beliefs. In 1000 A.D., the church officially declared November 2 as All Souls’ Day, a day to honor the dead. It’s widely believed today that the church fully intended to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, church-sanctioned holiday.

All Souls’ Day was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels and devils. The Christian All Saints’ Day celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas and the night before it, the traditional night of Samhain in the Celtic religion, began to be called All-Hallows Eve-which was over time eventually simplified to Halloween. This is the foundation of the Halloween we still celebrate as a secular holiday today.

When the Halloween party and the Trunk or Treat is over, trust Atlantic Sweeping & Cleaning to clean up the mess. We can make that mess disappear efficiently and in a cost effective manner. Call or click today!