What the hell is Halloween?

Why am I dressed like a frog? Watch this video and find out! Halloween is a very very old tradition that dates back to a group of people called Celts. What is “trick or treating“? Why are people buying pumpkins and not eating them? Learn the answers to these questions and more! TRANSCRIPT Welcome to the Halloween lesson. My name is Jack, Jack-O’-Lantern. Do you want to find out about me? Hello. It’s Halloween -- my favorite time of the year. I’m dressed like a frog. This is my costume, not my natural attire for teaching at EngVid. My name is Ronnie. I’m a frog today. I’m going to teach you about my favorite holiday: Halloween. You might be asking yourself, “What the hell is ’Halloween’? And why is Ronnie wearing a frog costume? What is she doing?“ Phew! That’s hot. So what I’m going to go through is what we do in Canada and in America for Halloween. The first thing -- and the most exciting thing -- that we do when we’re children is we go trick or treating. So we wear a costume like this. Any costume you want, you can wear. A lot of little girls like to be princesses or witches. It’s really, really up to you. It’s your imagination -- let your imagination run wild. You can choose any costume you would like. So what we do is we dress up in costumes and we go around our neighborhood to our houses that live -- to the people that live around us, and we ring their doorbells, and we go, “Trick or treat!“ And the lovely people give us candy for free. We don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to pay them money. They just give you free candy. As a child, I loved this, as you can imagine. Little Ronnie going to houses, “Trick or treat! Give me candy.“ So “trick or treat“ -- “trick“ means, like, a joke. And “treat“ means like a snack or candy. A long, long, long, long time ago, this actually had a meaning, but we’ll get to that later. As I’ve written down on the board too, we wear costumes -- anything you want. Some people spend a lot of money on their costumes. I got mine in Japan, in Hokkaido. I think it was $12, my frog costume. We wear costumes because it’s fun to be another person. Usually, trick or treating is only for children because when we get to a certain age, we can buy our own candy -- buy your own candy. Get a job, okay? And when we get older, we still wear costumes. It’s fun. We usually go to a Halloween party. People dress up, drink a lot, have fun. This thing, this guy right here -- it’s not a pumpkin. This is a pumpkin. A “pumpkin“ is a fruit, and it’s orange or it can be green, and we usually eat it, but Jack-O’-Lanterns are very different. A Jack-O’-Lantern actually has carvings into the pumpkin. “What a strange thing that you guys do, isn’t it?“ Jack-O’-Lantern is a pumpkin with a face in it. So Jack-O’-Lantern has a face, and it’s actually a pumpkin. “Trick or treat! Smell my feet! Give me something good to eat!“ Is what we used to say. Let’s go back in history. “Why? What is this? What are you doing here?“ We have -- 2000 years ago, the Celtic people -- now, these are people that lived in Ireland and Scotland and the north of France -- they had a belief -- it’s getting hot in here, guys -- that on October 31st, which is actually called “All Hallows’ Eve“, that dead people returned to earth. Now, I know if you are from Japan, you have a holiday called “Obon“. I’m not really good with the pronunciation. You believe that your ancestors come back to earth and visit you. In Mexico -- arriba! What up? -- you guys have “Day of the Dead“. Again, you believe that the dead come back to the earth. This is the exact same thing, except in North America, we have made it so that we get candy -- same idea. So the pronunciation of this word -- Ah! Jeeze! Yeah. There’s been some controversy of it. Because it is a Celtic word -- it looks like it should be “Samhaiam“ -- but it’s actually “Sah wvin“. Now, there’s been some debate on is it Scottish Gaelic? Is it Gaelic? I honestly do not speak Gaelic, obviously, and I’ve just looked on the Internet -- apparently, it’s called “Sah wvin“. Sometimes it’s called “So wvin“ -- I don’t know. Just call it Halloween, okay? So 2000 years ago, people believed that dead people returned to the earth. Some of these people were good people, but some of the people were evil, bad people. So what they would do is they would wear animal skin -- like a frog -- costumes to disguise themselves so that the evil spirits didn’t take their souls. So the costumes come from people actually wearing animal skins to disguise themselves. So we’ve stolen this, but unfortunately, we’ve made our costumes cute or sexy. “Hey, look! I’m a sexy pirate.“ Good. Why don’t you be a pirate with one eye that eats people, okay? Then we have trick or treat. Trick or treat happened probably after this, and a long story short, people would go to other people’s houses, and they would pray for their ancestors.