Halloween Informative Speech

Halloween is the season for little ghosts and goblins to take to the streets, asking for candy and scaring one another silly. Spooky stories are told around fires, scary movies appear in theaters and pumpkins are expertly (and not-so-expertly) carved into jack-o’-lanterns. Through the ages, various supernatural entities—including fairies and witches—came to be associated with Halloween, and more than a century ago in Ireland, the event was said to be a time when spirits of the dead could return to haunt their old grounds. Dressing up as ghosts and witches became fashionable, though as the holiday became more widespread and more commercialized (and with the arrival of mass-manufactured costumes), the selection of disguises for kids and adults
Because ancient records are sparse and fragmentary, the exact nature of Samhain is not fully understood, but it was an annual communal meeting at the end of the harvest year, a time to gather resources for the winter months and bring animals back from pastures. Samhain is also thought to have been a time for communicating with the dead, according to folklorist John Santino. “There was a belief that it was a day when spirits of the dead would cross over into the other world,” Santino told Live Science. Such moments of transition in the year have always been thought to be special and supernatural, and it provides a safe way to play with the concept of death. People dress up as the living dead, and fake gravestones adorn front lawns—activities that wouldn’t be tolerated at other times of the year, he said. But according to Nicholas Rogers, a history professor at York University in Toronto and author of Halloween: From pagan Ritual to Party Night (Oxford University press, 2003), “there is no hard evidence that Samhain was specifically devoted to the dead or to ancestor