Halloween is the second most popular
holiday in the United States.
Halloween Traditions mostly originated from the pagan religious practices of the Celts many years ago. Through the years these traditions were modified and new traditions were added. In modern day Halloween, it has more traditions than any other holiday that the United States has. In fact it has a whole list of them where the most popular are listed below.
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Dressing in costume
Trick-or-Treating
Pumpkin Carving
Hay Rides
Yard Rolling / TPing
Halloween Carnivals
Bobbin for apples
Cake Walks
Touring Haunted Houses
Spook Hunting
Visiting Grave Yards
Theme Costume Parties
Bonfires
Halloween Cooking
Telling Ghost Stories
Decorating Spooky Yards and porches
Sharing Spells
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October
Halloween is always on October 31st each and every year. Mischief night is always on October 30th because that is the day that people do the most tricks and get up to mischief. As a whole Halloween is celebrated all throughout the month of October though.
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It was Traditional in my family
to go trick-or-treating at the homes of people that we knew. Each and every year we looked forward to the local fire department to put on the October Halloween Carnival. The last few years they started calling it a fall festival instead of a Halloween Carnival but everyone still shows up in costumes and they still serve the traditional candy apples, caramel apples and the best chili you could ever taste.
Cake Walks
It was traditional for them to always have a cake walk where you had a chance at winning a cake. In fact cake walks are very popular the whole month of October at all kinds of events and even in November for all the Fall Festivals. I myself have helped run a few cake walks in my day and it is a lot of fun too! It's traditional in my family to volunteer halloween cakes for the cake walks. I myself loved to cook the spider cakes!
What are cake walks?
You place chairs in a full circle and you have people stand behind them. No this is not like musical chairs where you have to be the first one to sit down. Music is played (spooky music is best) and everyone walks around in a circle in front of the chairs. When the music stops, you put your hands on 1 chair to claim it. A number is dawned from a bowl and if the chair you are holding has that number on it, you win a cake! We never could resist playing cake walks and the money made was put to a good cause.
When the carnival was over it was traditional for us to go to mothers house and eat the cake that we won at the cake walk. We never missed a year! Mother would make a pot of hot coffee and we would drink it while we ate. We usually couldn't resist going out on the back porch in the dark to see if we could hear any mischief trying to take place.
It was traditional for Mother and Daddy's house to get rolled each year. Oh what fun my Daddy had with that. He loved trying to catch the kids TPing as much as the kids loved trying to do it without getting caught by Daddy.
It was also traditional to carve a Halloween pumpkin on the last week of October and set it on the porch. Mother would put a candle in it each night for that week until Halloween.
We couldn't resist decorating our front porch up either. We would have the traditional spook sitting in a rocking chair and the black lights on the porch to make it look spooky.
It was also traditional to go yard rolling or TPing as some people call it. My Daddy did it as a boy and now it's 3 generations later and we haven't missed a year rolling yards yet!
