Top 10 Weirdest Things about Halloween
Weird, my friend has resurfaced just in time for the hype for Halloween to start. It's a peculiar evening, to begin with, but what are the weirdest parts of it? From its origins to the costumes and everything in between, let's find out!
Yeah, sure, nowadays, it's just a fun party game, but bobbing for apples originally was a weird way for young women to get husbands. What women would do is mark apples with a number and young men would bob for them, the way they do these days, and if the guy got one with a certain number on it, they'd found out which woman's apple it was, and voila, they found their soulmate.
Yeah, that's right. The type of moon most associated with Halloween is almost never on Halloween. There was a full blue moon on Halloween 2020. Other than that, the most recent full moon Halloweens were in 2001, 1974, and 1955. So, why do we associate a full moon with Halloween when we almost never get one?
That's pretty interesting, I wonder if it will happen again soon
How do I figure this? Well, I got into doing my research, and the term "bonfire" is derived from "bone fire," and during Samhain (the catalyst for Halloween, if you will,) Catholic priests would burn the bones of their cattle. Don't take this too seriously (but what I say is true, don't get the wrong idea) but that is what you'd be doing if it were still Samhain and not Halloween.
Bone fires? That's a surprising revelation.
A little crash course on this myth: the tainted candy myth is the thought that Halloween candy can be drugged or even poisoned. One known case of this is a kid who died after digesting his uncle's heroin. Another case is a father who sprinkled cyanide in his kids' candy with cyanide to collect life insurance on them. The horrible thing is those aren't even the worst instances. They were bad, but back in 1964, Helen Pfeil got tired of teens asking her for candy, so she provided it, with arsenic in it. She was later arrested for her crime.
This has nothing to do with kids being possessed (if you ask most people, that is.) If a kid is wearing a mask, given their identity is hidden, those kids are more likely to steal candy, or even money, than kids who are dressing up as cowboys, princesses, Superman, pixies or, any other costume that doesn't need a mask
These days, when you think "trick or treat," the thought that goes directly with it is kids asking for candy, wearing cute (or often not so cute and quite sinister) costumes, but when it was still a relatively new holiday, the "trick" part of "trick or treat" was a threat to the person (although it was often idle, more so than not.) And the treat part, generally speaking, is candy, although in some cultures it was money. A small example of what the trick would be is toilet papering.
Americans love Halloween. It is the second most commercial holiday in the United States, only surpassed by Christmas. We consume about 300,000 pounds of it (two pounds per person!) on Halloween week alone. That's already sounding like a lot of candy, but enough to fill a huge vessel that they said not even God can sink six times?
I honestly would have guessed more...
I get that people are superstitious and all, but this one is just plain stupid. Lots of people reject black cats because of the old superstition that they're witches in disguise. They're also (wrongly) associated with bad luck, and the dark side, black cats are often used for pranks, party props, and even satanic, sacrificial rituals around Halloween. During Halloween, they're even subject to animal abuse
I can understand why this came to be. Parents dress their children as monsters, vampires, devils, witches, ghosts, and clowns, and tell them to ask strangers candy, and adults dress in similar strange and outlandish costumes and go to parties in rooms decorated like dungeons. Doesn't really sound like something Jesus would tell me to do. But, on the flip side, there are Christian church sermons for youth groups on Halloween night, and every year, they have some kind of message, and not everybody dresses up as something evil. Unless you think cowboys, Avengers, rock stars, and politicians are evil
In 2004, Hollywood passed a law that banned silly string from the area on Halloween. If you're caught with silly string between 12 a.m. on Halloween and 12 p.m. on November 1, you'll get a $1,000 fine. Along with being "bad for the environment" and annoying to clean up, the law also claims that silly string may cause pedestrians and police officers on horseback or motorcycles to slip and fall. No offense, Hollywood, but even when this law was passed, cars were already a thing. Why horseback?
It was actually released on November 29, 1982, so this doesn't need to be here. I LOVE Michael Jackson!! Great that he's on here.
It was released in November in the UK, and in January of the following year in the United States.