Based Camp - October 29, 2026


Halloween & The Colonization of Christian Holidays

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Episode Stats


Length

48 minutes

Words per minute

163.22

Word count

7,958

Sentence count

126

Harmful content

Toxicity

8

sentences flagged

Hate speech

14

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Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 right hello simone i'm excited to be here with you today today we are going to be busting the
00:00:08.540 myth that the modern practice of halloween has any meaningful pagan roots at all but you know
00:00:18.020 the pumpkins and the cords and the lights and the you got to scare away that thing traces back to
00:00:24.140 anything pagan and we will go through each thing with receipts um and it is going to shock i think
00:00:31.240 a lot of people who have bought into this myth because it is a persistent myth and it feels
00:00:35.640 cool like oh i bet the pagans did something around that time my life has been a lie god
00:00:46.560 is dead the government's lame thanksgiving is about killing indians jesus wasn't born on christmas 0.94
00:00:51.320 don't christian families say well we don't celebrate halloween because that's a demonic 0.96
00:00:58.580 holiday etc they also say that about christmas and they say that about a lot of things so it's
00:01:04.720 actually really fascinating as you get into it where the various halloween traditions come from
00:01:09.600 so for example can you guess the practice of trick-or-treating is actually an evolution
00:01:18.920 of another practice that was just something you did before any holiday and there is another
00:01:26.420 evolution yeah wassail what wassail okay what was it describe it you uh you get kind of drunk and
00:01:33.700 you go from house to house and you ask for more like food and drink okay so you're familiar with
00:01:38.560 it yeah so what the the the practice that today we know is trick-or-treating is actually the exact
00:01:45.780 same practice that we today know as caroling just evolved in two different directions both
00:01:52.020 practiced before two important christian holidays oh just like raid people's house
00:01:58.560 it just seems it seems like a very disturbing thing to have happen like oh gosh they're gonna
00:02:04.440 so what simone is oh well specifically the iteration that you're familiar with the more
00:02:10.940 aggressive one uh is not a general british tradition it came from the the you can guess who
00:02:18.600 the backwards people the lower scottish reavers um in in in the in the normal version of this 0.66
00:02:25.940 tradition what you would do is uh before all hallows eve um or all saints day uh you would 0.99
00:02:32.600 go door to door and you would say uh if you give me a treat i will pray for your dead people
00:02:39.540 oh you're right i'll pray for dead people in your family um a very christian tradition by the way
00:02:46.240 this is like a a thoroughly christian tradition but then the the backwoods people who ended up
00:02:52.020 becoming one of the dominant cultural groups in the united states that now form the the core of
00:02:56.620 what we call americana uh they had a separate tradition where they would go and um basically
00:03:03.960 come to your house and be like give us something or we'll f up your property um and you see this
00:03:10.680 captured in the even even some traditional carols like give us some figgy pudding we won't go until
00:03:18.680 we get some yeah so bring it right here it's it's quite a forceful song if you if you listen to the
00:03:25.440 lyrics yeah yeah it's basically yeah give us food and drink or you're gonna regret it yeah give us
00:03:32.460 food and drink or you're going to grab it which was exactly what the initial version of what we
00:03:36.720 today think of as trick-or-treating was um and the other the other fun part of it is its association
00:03:43.120 with ghosts and goblins and everything like that that was created from the 1900s to like 1920s
00:03:51.900 primarily by holiday card companies and so you'd say well how did wait why were holiday card
00:03:58.820 companies why did they associate those things with the holiday in the first place yeah and there were
00:04:03.200 two reasons reason number one is so if we look at the early christian iteration of this holiday
00:04:08.840 you can see because it doesn't begin to look more and more like a ghost and ghouls and go out and
00:04:14.680 dress up day until very very very modern iterations of it um and and those iterations bear some
00:04:21.700 resemblance to stuff that was practiced around this period hundreds of years before the first
00:04:27.240 Halloween was. The problem is, is that the first Halloween didn't include all of those elements
00:04:33.840 that looked vaguely pagan. And because of that, you can't draw a connection between the pagan
00:04:39.960 tradition and the first Halloween. But you could say, okay, well, so how did it get associated with
00:04:45.100 the dead to begin with? So it was originally a holiday for all saints. This is where it got the
00:04:50.820 name All Saints Day. Wait, hold on though. No, you can't have it both ways. You can't be the
00:04:56.920 catholic church and say okay let's just celebrate all the saints on like president's day and then
00:05:02.060 be like but then we also need a holiday for all the best saints well so it changed over time
00:05:08.800 we have a president's day come on it was like the president's day of saints because many saints
00:05:14.960 didn't have individual holidays oh so it was for all the other it's all other saints well including
00:05:21.200 those things but then it evolved and it became for all martyrs um and then oh is that where some
00:05:27.340 of the spookiness comes in for no it was for everyone who had martyred themselves on behalf
00:05:32.020 of the church then much much much later it became the holiday for all christian dead people um
00:05:38.940 because they basically it was just sort of a cultural phenomenon that you can see you sort
00:05:43.400 of loosen it well can we pray for this person to this day sure yeah why not um
00:05:49.980 have a blast looser and looser and looser and became a holiday for all dead people and that's
00:05:57.120 where it got the death connection but that death connection comes directly downstream of saints
00:06:05.180 and then martyrs which are very very very christian ideas then you have the um well then
00:06:12.700 what about what where did it get this occult connection where did it get this magic mysticism
00:06:17.320 connection yeah actually one of its oldest traditions uh still only dating to around
00:06:24.280 the 1800s um but as a tradition so long after anyone remembered anything pagan uh it was
00:06:32.020 actually again from the reavers or the scottish people that this tradition was entered and it was
00:06:38.240 based around a number of ceremonies i guess you could say that people did as part of courtship
00:06:46.060 rituals um it's not a courtship holiday this is not a courtship i know it actually had nothing to
00:06:54.200 do with the holiday at all the only reason the two became associated is because halloween given
00:07:01.300 its time of year it already was a holiday where people were doing like uh pranks and stuff like 0.97
00:07:08.080 this and you'd have a party so it was a perfect time for young rural backwoods scottish people 0.95
00:07:15.420 to do their courtship rituals um and that's how the two became connected they they weren't like
00:07:21.560 intrinsically linked at all it was just a very convenient day to do this type of thing um think
00:07:28.320 of it like this like a ho dance or something like this um which is like a traditional american style
00:07:35.100 well originally from an adaption of like a kaylee so Scottish again dance you didn't do those at any
00:07:43.080 time during the year there was so you would have a a ho dance right yeah you would likely have a
00:07:48.440 ho down or a kaylee down with specific holidays where ho downs happened like things like around
00:07:57.320 a harvest festival would be yeah oh oh a harvest festival halloween is already is essentially a
00:08:04.680 variation of a harvest festival i guess you're right you would go out and do your harvest festival
00:08:09.740 dances and the teens get up to it oh golly they were basically and you're like well they're occult
00:08:16.240 right like they're occult rituals and it's like kind of they're sort of occult or they would have
00:08:22.000 been that part of time if you're wondering what a courtship uh ritual like this would look like
00:08:28.360 have you ever played that game where you have a thing attached to your fingers and you open it
00:08:32.960 in different ways uh there's a whole cootie catcher yeah cootie catcher and it's like what's
00:08:38.360 your future husband gonna look like you know the girls at our school have been hiding something
00:08:43.260 from us what if i were to tell you that the girls have a device which allows them to see
00:08:49.580 into the future okay baby what do you want to know i want to know if i'm gonna live in a big
00:08:55.740 mansion in the future okay let's find out ready pick a number four one two three four okay pick
00:09:03.320 color blue b-l-u-e i pick another color red okay okay will baby live in a big mansion in the future
00:09:11.340 definitely yes yes and you do the thing uh these ceremonies were essentially
00:09:17.380 an ancient scottish version of that and so if we go over a few of these you have the kale
00:09:23.900 slash cabbage stalks blindfolded you pulled the first stalk you touched in the dark its side shape
00:09:29.660 and straightness taste of the core and amount of dirt on the roots revealed that the future
00:09:34.300 spouse's looks temperament and wealth the stock was sometimes hung over the door the first person
00:09:39.840 to walk under it supposedly shared the name of your partner couples sometimes went out together
00:09:45.600 burns describes the flirtation and joking around it so this is talking about one of the guys who
00:09:50.420 who researched this apples this is where apple bobbing on halloween came from from one of these
00:09:56.020 traditions so apples were labeled with names the one you successfully bit bobbing in the water or
00:10:06.980 snapping from a string indicated your match or you peel one in a continuous strip and threw the peel
00:10:13.300 over your shoulder to form the initial uh the initial of a future spouse a candlelit mirror
00:10:19.860 plus eating apple slices was said to show the future partner's face over your shoulder
00:10:25.380 these put people in close physical proximity then was nuts you had two nuts named for a couple or
00:10:32.320 two people they were thrown into a fire if they burned quietly side by side the match was good
00:10:37.960 if they jumped apart or one exploded it was bad easy to stage or to interrupt at a party
00:10:44.620 um and then there were variants of of mirrors related stuff so this is uh the earliest written
00:10:50.120 description we have from this is 18th century scotland a 1769 travel accountant by thomas
00:10:55.500 pennant mentions young people drawing cabbages blindfolded on all hallows eve to determine
00:11:00.880 the figure and size of their future husbands robert burns 1785 poem halloween which by the
00:11:07.940 way was just a scottish word for all's hallows eve it's a shortening of that no connection to
00:11:12.260 anything occulted the irish war does have a connection to something occultic which we'll
00:11:16.160 go into but it's not a direct connection with his own the most famous and detailed early source it
00:11:24.740 describes kale pulling nut burning apple games and other rights as ordinary rural scottish party
00:11:30.320 activities from there the games were frequently brought into so basically they weren't occultic
00:11:36.580 in the way you think of, like, Wiccan occultism.
00:11:39.320 They were occultic in the way you think of cutie catchers as occultic, okay?
00:11:43.860 That's so funny.
00:11:45.320 A holiday associated with, and these practices,
00:11:49.100 we don't have anything before this.
00:11:50.540 By 1769, there was no good recording or cultural memory
00:11:58.120 of what the rural pagan practices of this region would have been.
00:12:02.760 For people who are unaware, those practices die out
00:12:06.360 very very very quickly well they must be so localized and ephemeral too like the stuff
00:12:12.240 that you might see at one school and then another school for example like the the variation in
00:12:17.060 cootie catcher behavior yes so a good example of this is i could say do you know what your
00:12:23.420 grandfather or let's not let's say great grandfather do you know the types of party
00:12:30.260 games that your great grandfather played oh goodness potential spouses you would say to
00:12:35.640 yourself um i maybe like if you're pulling on anything you're going to be pulling on popular
00:12:40.980 culture you're going to be pulling on some movie you saw or some book you read um now consider
00:12:47.660 that if you're talking about a pagan ritual here um you're talking about something that would have
00:12:53.580 not been their great-grandfather but would have been their great great great great great great
00:12:57.540 great great great grandfather in this region and any reference that they would have had to it had
00:13:02.940 been largely wiped out by the church specifically the time difference between the last summer high
00:13:09.380 and the first all saints day was between a thousand and two hundred years to a thousand
00:13:17.100 and four hundred years this is like what we have documented on record the idea that you remembered
00:13:23.740 a holiday that your ancestors practiced over a thousand years before and note this was a minor
00:13:31.520 holiday not the major druid holiday and somehow recreated it is completely absurd so when they
00:13:40.860 were trying to think of it in pop culture often and this is why when you look at modern paganism 0.66
00:13:47.680 it pulls so much from church depictions of the evil witch because that's the only cultural
00:13:54.640 reference they had they just were unaware of anything other than that um which is which is
00:14:01.640 where that came from so uh what was actually very interesting to me is how much of modern halloween
00:14:07.860 is a backwoods american tradition not really drawing like most of the unique traditions we
00:14:13.740 associate including the jack-o'-lantern which we'll get to in a second actually i'll just go
00:14:17.060 into the gist of the jack-o'-lantern now so um the jack-o'-lantern was a turnip that you would
00:14:24.240 carve a face into we know of it from the 1900s or the fairly modern right certainly nothing to
00:14:32.260 go back to anything ancient than that um and it was done as part of the guising process that we
00:14:37.460 were talking about here the process where you would go house to house and ask for things or
00:14:41.700 and the goal was you would carve a face on it to attempt to startle them because again they were
00:14:48.300 very playful people but the real reason that they were used and placed around was simply because
00:14:56.000 this was a night when a lot of people were going around house to house and you needed lights out
00:15:02.560 and this was cheaper than any other way you could carry a light so they used a carved out turnip
00:15:10.040 because that was easier than a real lamp because you all of a sudden needed a bunch of lamps for
00:15:15.800 just one night a year that's that's where it came from again no ancient connection it was just a
00:15:21.280 practicality thing um so the strongest i will give you one or we'll go with two potential
00:15:29.760 pagan leaks to halloween okay okay and then we're going to talk about some forgotten halloween
00:15:35.060 practices we'll talk about why pagans have to keep colonizing christian holidays in fact i
00:15:39.980 would say i i people i i am not sure people might be very angry about this episode just like they
00:15:45.140 were about the christmas one yeah we're pointing people really don't like i don't what is it what
00:15:49.160 is it with christians being super not okay with their holidays actually being christian i don't
00:15:54.100 understand we point out that christmas actually has no discernible pagan roots see our episode
00:15:58.700 on that if you want to disagree with us on that um you there's this big myth that it came from
00:16:03.100 saturnalia and it didn't um but again see our episode on that i'm not going to litigate that
00:16:07.700 here uh the the the real reason that pagans have had to colonize christian holidays is because
00:16:13.760 modern paganism is invented it just real european paganism died out so long ago uh in the regions
00:16:25.180 that want to reimagine it that and see our episode on wiccanism is mostly a modern fabrication which
00:16:30.900 like everybody admits now like everybody involved in it admits like yeah this was a fabrication
00:16:35.520 um that mostly pulls from like kabbalism and then stuff that was made up on drug trips um that that
00:16:42.760 because there just isn't anything to go on like we just we have very little understanding of what
00:16:48.180 like for example the ancient irish even believed um in terms of their religious for example which
00:16:54.040 is where we say this came from even from a historic scholarly standpoint but to continue here
00:16:59.340 the two strong ones you can have are samain so samain was a uh a holiday that was a pagan holiday
00:17:09.380 medieval irelish records recorded as a time of assemblies markets courts and tribute and a night
00:17:17.340 when the other world or the the this the world of the seeley or the sid uh was uh easier for them
00:17:25.080 to come over to our world and and potentially interact with us no there are some very important
00:17:30.820 notes about this um and so this was happening in november it it was it was uh so associated
00:17:38.040 samay was so associated with november that it became the irish word for november which is where
00:17:43.880 the confusion ends up becoming coming in in the same way that like wednesday comes from the the
00:17:48.960 word woad right like woden but nobody associates wednesday was woden anymore right you know
00:17:55.660 some some main took over for november in in irish now i i need to note here what's very important
00:18:02.280 about this uh loosening of the barrier that happened during this holiday it was tied
00:18:08.660 specifically to irish folk mythology barriers okay not human dead people ah the world of the
00:18:17.200 Sili is in mythology, think of it as like a trickster, evil, fairy world.
00:18:26.040 And the barrier between that and our world, not the world of the dead, was becoming looser during this holiday. 0.63
00:18:33.900 Where the connection comes in is that the Irish call their version of Halloween the Night of Samané.
00:18:43.600 Ochi Samané.
00:18:44.520 and so a lot of people point to this and they say this proves that it has a connection to the
00:18:53.080 pagan festival the problem was is that when it was first practiced one it looked nothing like
00:19:00.040 that pagan festival it was an all saints eve night and two they were just naming it because of the
00:19:07.000 month in the same way that like it would be like saying that Wednesday in the Addams family is
00:19:15.760 named Wednesday to hearken to pagan celebrations because Wednesday originally meant Woden's day
00:19:24.460 and who is Woden's family looks kind of spooky and therefore Wednesday Adam must be named after
00:19:31.480 Woden the real reason if you don't know it's because of a poem Wednesday is the child of woe
00:19:35.720 I didn't know that Woden was the chief and foremost god of the pagan Anglo-Saxons in Germanic mythology.
00:19:43.620 Right.
00:19:43.940 Wow. 1.00
00:19:44.420 But you see, if somebody told you that Wednesday was named Wednesday because of Woden, you would look at them like they were an idiot. 1.00
00:19:50.860 Yeah. 1.00
00:19:51.740 Right?
00:19:52.000 You're like, no, we have a clear chain of events.
00:19:56.920 Yes, Wednesday looks spooky and pagany.
00:19:59.900 Yes, Wednesday is named Wednesday, and that is where that word came from.
00:20:03.800 No, Wednesday is styled much more like a Catholic schoolgirl-inspired look than Pagan-y.
00:20:10.020 Right, but all of Halloween is styled more like a traditional Christian celebration. 0.97
00:20:16.180 Fair. 0.98
00:20:17.040 That's the point I'm making, in the same way the Addams Family is an inversion of a Christian whatever. 0.83
00:20:24.360 But anyway, we have an episode on that that never went live.
00:20:28.080 We could do a redo of that one.
00:20:31.380 I think it's a good one.
00:20:33.320 but yeah so the the point being is when we have the uh best documented medieval english and
00:20:39.620 catholic halloween practices what did halloween actually look like when it was still an all saints
00:20:44.300 day okay um so this if it came from the pagan tradition it would look most like the pagan
00:20:50.680 tradition when it started not in its modern form which is instead what's often litigated here
00:20:58.160 so the best documented medieval halloween practices are english and catholic they had
00:21:04.520 church bells rung all night on october 31st for souls in purgatory soul cakes prayers for the
00:21:10.140 dead those largely faded after the reformation the earliest detailed folk descriptions of games
00:21:15.520 and customs were associated with a knight from lowland scott speaking again scotland lowland
00:21:21.560 scotland is from where the reavers were that ended up making up backwards american culture
00:21:24.740 in the 1780s poems from john mayer and robert burns american halloween is basically the 19th
00:21:31.900 century irish and scottish folk version brought over by immigrants and not very irish actually
00:21:37.560 as far as i can find i i couldn't find anything that specifically came from ireland except
00:21:42.120 and this is the one maybe thing that you could argue is pagan about halloween okay i'll give
00:21:48.340 you guys in out the date and the only way you can argue the date is pagan is because we don't know
00:21:55.760 where the date came from um what we do know is that there was already an all saints festival
00:22:01.800 on the 20th of april and they started doing a separate different all saints festival in the
00:22:09.660 places where halloween started on the first of november that's that's just basically being like
00:22:15.580 maybe because we don't know where the date came from it could plausibly be pagan because there
00:22:23.100 was some sort of a festival practiced around this time in pagan traditions in these areas
00:22:29.800 the problem is is one it hadn't been practiced for many generations at that point and the second
00:22:36.440 is that uh the the um the the early christian celebration just like if i'm comparing these
00:22:46.340 two things right like i have a festival around like when the fairies come to our world and um
00:22:52.120 it's a day for like community gathering and a party of some sort and taxes so i have that and
00:22:59.520 then i have the all saints day where we ring the church bells and we pray for dead saints
00:23:02.980 um the two just don't seem connected enough for one to have come from the other to me
00:23:07.940 like plausibly but everything else there would be a hundred percent at least in origin from
00:23:15.860 christian communities that doesn't mean biblical it just means an evolution of a christian tradition
00:23:20.940 um one thing i'd note here on the the turnips that they would carry around the jack-o'-lanterns
00:23:27.200 um these word that they use for jack-o'-lantern translated to will-o-wisp um now some people
00:23:34.640 could say oh that's pagan isn't it except that comes from if you don't know what a will-o-wisp
00:23:40.100 is isn't that just the burning fire that you would like a blue fire you'd see in the moors
00:23:45.480 like maybe yeah it's an optical illusion created by swamps and moors oh i thought it was gases on
00:23:50.540 the moors igniting or something it might be gases igniting it's a it's a it's a phenomenon like it's
00:23:55.720 real thing that they were seen yeah and what did communities believe that willow wisps were
00:24:01.040 they thought that they were souls in purgatory okay which i mean the christian concept not a
00:24:06.920 pagan concept anyone's good guess at the time anyone's good guess right yes so that's what
00:24:16.380 are some other ones here oh yeah another funny thing that people go if you if you look at the
00:24:20.580 pagan traditions and you're looking for the date of the pagan traditions a lot of people try to
00:24:25.620 connected to a druid holiday when the the major druid holiday that we're aware of was bellotine
00:24:31.360 this was the one where they did all the bonfires and everything and this was the first of may
00:24:35.680 nowhere close to the date of halloween you have to posit a separate ceremony that we know very
00:24:42.620 little about and assume that it rung through that in the uh at least by the way in regards to saints
00:24:49.340 day just a bit of history here in the east this appears from the fourth century and is often
00:24:54.700 leaked to the Eastern season, for example, the Sunday after Pentecost in Anatoque, or the Friday
00:25:02.180 after Easter among some Syrians. The Eastern churches still keep all saints on the Sunday
00:25:06.720 after Pentecost in Rome. In 609 or 610, Pope Boniface IV received the Pantheon from the emperor,
00:25:17.680 redacted it to May, and all martyrs on the 13th of May. That became the Roman date for a while.
00:25:24.700 Over time, the feast expanded beyond what those who had been killed for the feast.
00:25:29.260 We talked about this already.
00:25:30.560 November 1st became a date standard in the West in the 9th century.
00:25:34.940 This cute little boy.
00:25:37.800 Okay, so November 1st became the standard in the West in the 9th century
00:25:43.540 under the Frankish Empire in 835 under Pope Gregory IV.
00:25:50.380 um the point of it was simply a virgil and it was all hallows eve it later evolved into something
00:25:59.000 called all souls day um and this is when it became uh more for all dead people um and this
00:26:05.680 was instituted around 998 to 1030 by abbot ordillo of kunli monasteries and then it began to spread
00:26:14.200 it sits after all saints on purpose the triumph of the states on the first and then being purified
00:26:19.560 on the second so it was like a a follow-up thing the practice where you remember how i said there
00:26:24.560 were two practices one was more aggressive and done by the backwoods people and the other was
00:26:27.780 a general we'll pray for your your dead ones if you give us food um the the nice one it was from
00:26:33.480 england in the 15th century and that was called solely the the more aggressive one from the
00:26:39.220 backwoods people was called guising and it's from the 16th century guising never heard of that
00:26:47.080 people especially kids put on disguises or masks and went door to door because they were doing
00:26:51.880 bad things sort of like ding dong dashing uh they usually performed something a song a palm
00:26:57.960 a joke a little trick um and got food nuts apples or coins it happened uh with various winter
00:27:05.960 festivals not just halloween again it also happened with um christmas uh but the reason
00:27:11.960 that you would wear masks when you were doing this is you were sort of blackmailing people
00:27:17.180 it had nothing to do like the mask and the tradition of costumes had nothing to do
00:27:22.100 with the occult so like for the same reason people are wearing surgical masks to protest
00:27:27.020 basically yes or people wear masks when they're robbing a convenience store oh sure goodness
00:27:34.140 um the uh well let's see here i can go directly into jack-o'-lanterns so in the 19th century
00:27:40.440 ireland and scotland people hollowed out turnips or other root vegetables and carved faces in them
00:27:44.780 sometimes putting a candle inside these were used as lanterns to startle people a folk tale
00:27:50.540 about stingy jack no this folk tale comes later than the tradition itself so we can't say that
00:27:56.420 the tradition came from the folk tale a man who tricked the devil and was doomed to wander with
00:28:01.220 coal in a turnip again very christian is a later explanation of the name the term jack-o'-lantern
00:28:06.740 originally meant willow wisp or night watchman pumpkins native to the americans and much easier
00:28:12.940 to carve replaced turnips once the custom reached north america clear records of carved pumpkins
00:28:18.540 specifically for halloween appear in the mid to late 1800s in the u.s and canada again deriving
00:28:23.600 from the turnip tradition not from any sort of occultic practice in regards to the postcards
00:28:28.500 roughly from 1905 to 1915 the golden age of the picture postcards they were like really big
00:28:34.160 collectors back then think of them like baseball cards of the time they were really cute too
00:28:39.140 very adorable yeah 3 000 unique halloween postcard designs historian lee martin and postcard
00:28:45.900 collectors have documented this extensively before that halloween imagery was local and inconsistent
00:28:51.520 what the postcards featured were witches often young and glamorous rather than purely hags black
00:28:58.820 cats jack-o'-lanterns ghosts and skeletons bats owls and crescent moons this was popularized not
00:29:05.380 by the occult but by major publishers john worship racial tuck and sons and others
00:29:12.580 and then it was the party good companies specifically dennis manufacturing companies
00:29:18.900 bogey book first issued in 1909 that began to uh push like crepe paper decorations and costumes
00:29:28.260 as well as table settings, and in a lot of these featured images of witches, black cats, jack-o'-lanterns, etc.
00:29:40.440 If you're wondering how bad this got during periods, there was something called the Black Halloween,
00:29:45.040 where vandalism was so bad that they almost thought about banning it in some parts of America.
00:29:49.560 Newspaper accounts from the 1880s onwards describe escalating pranks, soaping windows, tipping out houses,
00:29:55.700 removing the gates and signs on trolley tracks and pulling fire alarms that's really dangerous
00:30:02.400 that's not smashing windows by the 1910s and 1930s these often turned into large-scale damage
00:30:09.320 smashed stir fronts overturned cars fires street cars uh derailed or blocked an occasional serious
00:30:16.280 injury or even deaths including cases where homeowners shot at pranksters these are pretty
00:30:23.400 serious offenses yeah this is disturbing what on earth what's wrong with these people i uh
00:30:32.120 ask what were some of the traditions that used to be associated with this in backwoods america
00:30:37.740 which is where a lot of these traditions came from but have been forgotten so we can go over
00:30:41.380 a few of those cabbage night or gate night style pranks boys and teens raided gardens pulled
00:30:47.900 cabbages or kale and threw the stalks or heads at doors and windows they often stole gates tipped
00:30:54.480 outhouses and moved wagons or livestock and soaped windows in rural areas on october 31st the night
00:31:01.160 before was known as cabbage night or gate night there's a common in late 1800s early 1900s and
00:31:07.640 is well documented in newspapers from coal country and farming regions uh nut cracking night and
00:31:13.560 the hearse divinations families cracked and roasted nuts chase nuts hazelnuts and use them for
00:31:19.980 for divination uh we talked a little bit about that naming nuts after partners um graveyard and
00:31:26.420 abandoned house quote-unquote fortune games young people went to old graveyards or empty houses at
00:31:31.880 night variants included walking backwards around a grave a set number of times or leaving blank
00:31:38.080 paper in an abandoned house and returning the next day to see if a spirit had written their
00:31:44.340 future spouse's name on it. They're very concerned with who they're going to marry.
00:31:48.960 These are recorded in Appalachian folklore accounts. But again, no accounts that this
00:31:55.880 was pagan. This was an uneducated people that didn't have a lot of connections to some sort
00:32:01.560 of like older history. They were the types of games that you make up with your friends on your
00:32:06.860 own and then become a local tradition i remember games like this about local haunted houses
00:32:11.660 right like this is a part of americana culture and a spontaneously forming part of americana
00:32:17.080 culture that doesn't require any real pagan connection local omens and protective practices
00:32:22.440 some appellation accounts that mention specific halloween sometimes called hank night beliefs
00:32:26.980 avoiding certain paths or crossroads after dark laying a broom across a doorway said to stop
00:32:32.220 witches um or interpreting knocks at the window or a dog what is supposed to happen are they
00:32:38.160 supposed to trip what sorry oh put that there i'm just so confused sorry people are in the
00:32:49.820 cabbages why are people taking it takes a long time to grow a cabbage go on yeah it seems
00:32:56.040 mean but again yes we talk about the the morality of this culture which became the backbone of
00:33:03.760 american culture and the jack tales see our episode on that if you want to go deeper into
00:33:07.920 this culture's tradition but it is very much what this culture is about which is about
00:33:12.500 aggressive pranking um and and and ribbing and and having fun and uh that that's that's what
00:33:21.340 they care about in a way that comes off as like non-pretentious um and that's what we see a lot
00:33:26.640 of these being uh so in truth when your pagan goes out and celebrates on halloween it is not
00:33:37.780 the christians who have been tricked into a pagan celebration it is the pagans who have been tricked
00:33:43.260 into a christian celebration okay and if you wish to not practice all hellos eve for any reason
00:33:51.380 i would argue the best reason that you would have if you're looking at the evidence here
00:33:57.920 is that it was originally a saint celebration and saints are too close to icons which is too
00:34:05.260 close to idolatry which means you shouldn't touch it well no malcolm that means in the it was it
00:34:11.300 was always witchcraft it was always idolatry um it was always evil it's always been a a a demonic
00:34:19.040 holiday because it's always been about saints yes yes but my take is the holiday has evolved 0.82
00:34:26.620 from the catholic taint that it originally had and i think evolving to a night uh where you pray
00:34:36.120 for the dead and kids have fun and learn to be creative and dress up and think about what they
00:34:42.860 want to be. They learn to hustle. It teaches hustling. It teaches, I think, of all the still
00:34:50.640 practice traditions that are derivative of Christian traditions. I think it teaches the
00:34:54.520 best values. Specifically, you give the kids all the candy and you say, here, eat as much as you
00:34:59.880 want. And it teaches you. I remember for me, it taught me more than anything else in my life
00:35:04.460 that too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.
00:35:07.540 I remember that very vividly from Halloween.
00:35:10.780 My parents just being like,
00:35:11.700 yeah, sure, you can eat it all tonight.
00:35:13.200 And I was like, great, I love candy.
00:35:16.440 And then I ate it all.
00:35:17.380 And this is why I think it's very bad
00:35:18.840 to ration candy on Halloween.
00:35:20.860 The problem is, is that our kids
00:35:23.100 weren't able to learn that
00:35:25.340 because they intuitively rationed it.
00:35:28.660 Or if you're Torsten,
00:35:30.380 you just give all of your siblings the candy
00:35:33.200 because you hate sugar.
00:35:34.460 he gave it all away yeah once again we will indulge in that wonderful tradition of attempting
00:35:40.360 to get tourists and to eat candy on halloween the scariest point of all for him no no get a video
00:35:47.820 tonight if you try to give him candy oh my goodness i i mean i was kind of like him because 0.83
00:35:55.300 i didn't like most of the homie only i only ate the chocolates so it was only basically milky 0.97
00:35:59.620 ways and three musketeers that i could eat maybe if they had m&m's packs and so i would go around 0.98
00:36:04.740 the neighborhood go trick-or-treating and then return to my home base swap out in my home family
00:36:10.380 bucket um i would give all my candy to that and then take out like like equal for equal the
00:36:16.980 chocolates um that my family had bought so that i could actually eat my halloween candy and then i
00:36:22.820 slowly save it i i personally think that of the traditional christian holidays halloween is i
00:36:30.180 think the best in terms of values it teaches i think it's the best yeah i guess it either teaches
00:36:34.660 budgeting or overindulgence it teaches door-to-door hustle uh and there's creativity and it's it's
00:36:41.540 it's it's one of i think for kids one of the best oh it's so exciting it's so when you're out there
00:36:47.940 hitting the streets. I think it's more
00:36:50.020 evocative.
00:36:52.160 Every time when I
00:36:54.000 kind of watch my iPad for a while,
00:36:56.560 then
00:36:57.240 my iPad,
00:36:59.940 then my dad
00:37:01.360 needs to say something.
00:37:03.920 And it pauses itself. Yeah, because you're supposed
00:37:05.980 to answer the question. Yeah, you need to answer
00:37:07.960 the question. You have to answer the question. It's asking
00:37:09.980 if you're paying attention. And it wants to make
00:37:12.040 sure you've learned something. So you have to answer correctly, okay?
00:37:14.880 But Toasty, hey, what are you
00:37:16.060 going to do first? What am I saying ghost first?
00:37:17.500 and so you have to answer questions about ghosts specifically he's using something on his tablet
00:37:21.980 which you can flash any android device with any old one you have around your house
00:37:25.980 mudpuppy.ai backslash os and it not only makes kids watch documentaries educational videos and
00:37:35.200 play educational games to gain access to traditional cartoons like real ghostbusters
00:37:40.420 which is what he's watching here but during both of them it will regularly interrupt the show
00:37:45.440 and attempt to, using an AI agent, engage the kids in an intellectual or educational discussion,
00:37:52.780 which is what's being described here.
00:37:55.160 Now, Toasty, what are you going to be for Halloween?
00:37:58.960 I'll be the dragon that we happen to add in.
00:38:02.080 He's even, we're using a costume.
00:38:04.060 So, are you going to eat the candy?
00:38:07.980 Come back, Toasty.
00:38:10.300 I'm not going to force candy into...
00:38:13.120 anyway he's he's he's he's a scared
00:38:16.740 close the door testy anyway um 0.98
00:38:21.860 yeah the the i think it's very stupid to retreat from traditions when you get psyops into the idea 0.70
00:38:30.400 that they're pagan whether that christmas or easter will do something on that or halloween 0.73
00:38:35.240 i don't i don't know we've done our i think we did our christmas isn't really pagan video
00:38:39.480 um but we did and it bombed because people got super mad no no no i mean easter isn't really
00:38:46.660 halloween isn't pagan sorry i don't know if we did that i don't think we did okay but yeah
00:38:54.200 we're treating from good holidays that are an important part of a child's life and help them
00:38:58.620 build a cultural tradition and identity i do not think is a smart thing to do um on the
00:39:05.240 account of religious observance um i actually someone just sent me um a really helpful
00:39:13.180 explanation on x about um taking the lord's name in vain that that that commandment yeah uh his
00:39:20.020 explanation was basically putting words in god's mouth is taking the lord's name in vain you know
00:39:26.200 an example of some kind of you know televangelist saying you know well god wants you to do this
00:39:30.440 prosperity gospel he's putting words in god's mouth but also someone being like god doesn't
00:39:34.020 you to celebrate halloween who are you to say hello like follow the ten commandments don't
00:39:40.820 don't you editorialize actually simone being less familiar with the bible than me uh you're
00:39:46.900 actually explicitly allowed celebrations like halloween in the bible uh well okay i'm sure you
00:39:51.940 are i'm sure well like i remember something about like stomp your feet and dance to glorify god or
00:39:57.300 collations 2 16 uh which is the most direct it says therefore let no one pass judgment on you
00:40:03.500 in question of food and drink or in regards to a festival or a new moon or a sabbath
00:40:09.340 um it's basically so people are really doing wrong by saying you can't you can't celebrate
00:40:16.140 halloween it's a devilish holiday well i think it's similar to the sabbath
00:40:20.580 to each as a christian you're not supposed to pass judgment on other people in regards to
00:40:27.140 how they choose to celebrate it um but it's up to your own conscious whether you celebrate it or
00:40:32.940 not like if you feel like it's pulling you away from god then by all means don't do it if you
00:40:37.460 feel like it's it's helping you lean into your values then do it yeah that's the idea yeah i
00:40:42.300 like it i like it and that's my takeaway about halloween um so uh i i think that or any techno
00:40:50.800 the Puritan tradition. I think we're basically given free reign here to build our own traditions
00:40:57.360 and work on them insofar as they are focused on God or for us what God wants, which is for
00:41:06.300 humanity to do well, because God loves humanity. And that means for our kids to do well, because
00:41:10.380 that's the humanity that we most directly interact with. And so you show your love for God by
00:41:15.620 building traditions and doing things that lead to more long-term human flourishing that is
00:41:20.800 uh what i believe god wants from us the most and i think to the people who show their love of god
00:41:27.020 only through devotion directed at god rather than directed at the things god loves um it it's
00:41:35.120 it really misses the point of what god wants from you and so i think that
00:41:40.440 uh with something like halloween don't feel embarrassed about how we took these this tradition
00:41:52.480 and built into this if you want to have prohibitions against glorifying witchcraft on 0.64
00:41:57.440 halloween that's one thing right if you want to have prohibitions against your your daughter
00:42:01.640 dressing up like a princess on halloween i think that's uh moving in a direction that just is
00:42:07.040 explicitly robbing a child's life of joy and imagination. And for that, it's a bad thing to
00:42:14.840 do. Something that you would not do as a good, at least with an RSEC technopuritan. And so that's
00:42:22.980 the point. Yeah. And what we use, again, because this will be a track, what we use any holiday to
00:42:28.480 teach about Halloween specifically is to teach value sets. And the value sets of Halloween are
00:42:33.120 hustle imagination and the uh what was the other one hustle imagination and self-restraint slash
00:42:43.260 budgeting oh yeah self-restraint yeah eating types of stuff but it's also a great also budgeting
00:42:47.260 because i think a lot of kids also really find the love of delayed gratification and careful
00:42:53.140 rationing in halloween i know you didn't but i did it's also a great holiday for um
00:43:03.120 what was i going to say about halloween as a holiday for telling stories and i think that
00:43:09.440 if you are a parent you should get scary stories the book with the scary illustrations not the new
00:43:17.520 one and try to read your kid a scary story every halloween at the very least just as a i'm not
00:43:23.520 going to let this night go past because one those stories are collected from traditional american
00:43:30.000 folklore so you're reading them a part of original american folklore a part of their culture
00:43:35.500 assuming that they're from a good culture like america and two they are uh great evocative
00:43:43.720 stories that i think again help the night feel spooky i think one of the biggest
00:43:48.560 disappointments i have in the way that halloween is practiced today
00:43:53.180 is not that it has lost a religious message,
00:43:58.960 but that it's lost its spook factor.
00:44:01.220 And you as a parent have a job
00:44:03.080 to really spook your kids on Halloween.
00:44:05.760 The spookiest night of the year you're around.
00:44:07.160 You better get on that, Malcolm,
00:44:08.540 because they ain't spooked very much right now.
00:44:10.700 Well, maybe they need to get visited by Krampus this Halloween.
00:44:15.420 I think Halloween should be the opening of Krampus season.
00:44:19.140 Yes, the opening of Krampus season.
00:44:20.900 Our children believe in Krampus season.
00:44:23.180 I love you.
00:44:24.120 Any thoughts you have, Simone?
00:44:27.100 I love it.
00:44:28.180 I love it.
00:44:28.740 The big takeaway that I have that really blew my mind here was I had no idea that the wassail tradition was a sort of pre-holiday raid activity.
00:44:39.880 So that's fascinating.
00:44:42.480 Or that what we today think of as caroling and trick-or-treating are actually the same tradition.
00:44:49.540 That was really fun for me to learn.
00:44:51.060 I was like, oh, it's coming together now.
00:44:53.180 It is coming together. It's really cool.
00:44:56.540 And so just to tie this up for anyone who hasn't been following along here.
00:45:02.920 Trick or treating came from the same tradition that caroling came from.
00:45:07.300 The original holiday was a saint's memorial day.
00:45:11.260 Nothing to do with spooks or anything like that.
00:45:14.120 The spook tradition came downstream of mating rituals and wearing a mask because you were harassing people.
00:45:23.160 of one evolution of the caroling tradition and then that evolved into what we today think of
00:45:29.360 as this spooky holiday. Nothing pagan to it. Doesn't mean it's biblical, but it's certainly
00:45:35.620 not pagan. And then your question of, well, does that mean it's Christian? I view this as sort of
00:45:41.720 the same question of, well, was Abraham a Jew? I mean, was Moses a Jew? He didn't have the later
00:45:49.380 rabbinic tradition when did somebody become the first jew it's an evolving tradition as is
00:45:56.400 christianity and techno puritanism is just one direction of that evolution um and i i think that
00:46:03.040 being overly guarded about these sorts of things can just rob joy from a child's life but anyways
00:46:06.880 great talking to you uh one thing i'd recommend you guys do because i've been doing it for my
00:46:10.420 kids is making some halloween art for them on our fab to share with them uh so they get to
00:46:16.620 use the api use a collection of family photos um and you can tell it to make some fun uh that's
00:46:22.100 rfab.ai backslash api um and the tablet the toasty came in and he goes it's asking me questions yes
00:46:29.000 even during the recreational time and ai now stops to ask them things to engage them in intellectual
00:46:34.880 topics and they can earn points doing that because we believe that screens aren't so bad when they're
00:46:39.800 active pursuit that's intellectually engaging exactly and studies do that too dot ai backslash
00:46:46.840 os you can find this it also has literally like a built-in homeschooling system and a whole bunch
00:46:51.240 of learning games and other things you don't have to even include any recreational content it could
00:46:55.080 just all be learning stuff but we wanted something where we could give our kids a better tablet
00:47:02.120 experience or phone experience and this is awesome you can even drop in on the device like if they're
00:47:07.800 like in a separate room watching it or playing with it you can check in on their camera their
00:47:13.000 forward-facing camera and just do what they're up to or have a video call with them just to check in
00:47:16.960 it's really cool it's so cool anyway thanks for making it i love you too bye
00:47:24.880 planting in the spring and letting it lie fallow in the winter okay okay well we're gonna get
00:47:33.280 everything fixed we're gonna get those redone we're gonna get this house feeling nice that's
00:47:37.160 the point of cleaning malcolm's room i can't believe this this day came you can see the floor
00:47:44.120 you no longer live in the star wars trash compactor it is remarkable and i told you i'd
00:47:52.060 get myself together i was like you know what i should do it i should get myself together
00:47:54.820 i didn't i should have you didn't have faith in me i i do have faith in you i just you're like
00:48:02.940 is it going to make me sick then it's not worth it and it wasn't making you sick so
00:48:07.480 well we're getting it we're getting it done we're getting it done and i'm so glad
00:48:14.620 i'm really glad you're going on the hard ones
00:48:17.120 he's just using the cracks
00:48:21.060 wow
00:48:32.380 Wow.
00:48:38.380 I'll tell you how high I feel.
00:48:43.380 I'm here.
00:48:44.380 Well done.