Halloween is one of the most popular holidays of the year, drawing millions of children and more than a few adults into the streets going door to door, trick or treating or attending costume parties. In economic terms it's also a major holiday, second only to Christmas, with estimates on economic impact ranging from four to six billion dollars. With us this week to explain how this came to be, the origins and evolution of Halloween is David Scall, the author of "Death Makes a Holiday, a Cultural History of Halloween". Scall is also the author of "Hollywood Gothic", the Tangled Web of Dracula, From Novel to Stage to Screen" and "The Monster Show: a Cultural History of Horror". Welcome, David.

Thank you for having me, Brian.

Glad to have you. Now you opened the first chapter of your book with "Halloween has its essential roots in the terrors of the primitive mind, which made no distinction between the waning of the sun and the potential extinction of the self." What do you mean by this?

Well you know all throughout human history, holiday celebrations have been closely related to the cycles of the sun, the birth and death of the seasons, and metaphorically the waxing and waning and rebirth of human life. To pre-industrial people the harvest was literally a time when life and death were hanging in the balance. So it's no wonder that the ancient Celts believed that the end of October, beginning of November, was a very special and dangerous time when the veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead was especially transparent. And that was the very beginnings of the holiday we now call Halloween.

O.K., that makes a lot of sense but clearly what we have today is very different. And I think one of the most interesting parts of your book is how you trace this history and I'm quoting from you again. You describe the holiday as it currently stands as "a patchwork holiday, a kind of cultural Frankenstein stitched together quite recently from a number of traditions all fused beneath the cauldron light of the American melting pot". Wonderful wording! Let's talk about some of those traditions. You identify the Romans for example and their influence. How did they influence the holiday?

Halloween, like all other holidays, draws on many many influences. Holidays are always in a state of construction. And it's important to realize the way we celebrate Halloween today has very little to do with the way it was celebrated even a hundred years ago, much less back in antiquity. But when the Romans invaded the British Isles they brought their own pagan customs, especially the Feast of Saturnalia , which involved costumes and all kinds of orgiastic excesses. And then the Christians came in.

And what about Saint Patrick? What influence did he have on the holiday?

Well Saint Patrick of course his fame comes from his supposedly driving the snakes from Ireland. But we shouldn't take this literally because you know snakes never were indigenous to that island. This is really kind of folklore metaphor for Christianity driving out paganism.

O.K. Now we move up a bit to Pope Gregory the Fourth and you indicate that he's important here.

Extremely, because in his attempt to convert pagan peoples to Christianity, not just in the British Isles but all over the world, in the ninth century Pope Gregory rearranged the church calendar so that the church holidays or holy days corresponded with the old pagan festivals. So now Christmas was synchronized with the old Saturnalia, the Roman holiday that occurred at the end of December, the beginning of January. And the Feast of All Saints and the Feast of All Souls were now moved to the beginning of November and created a kind of a religious mini season known in the middle ages as Hallomass or Hallotide. And the night before these holidays, October 31, became known as Halloween or All Hallow's Evening.

Which takes us to the Renaissance and you point out here, sort of a segway from your earlier comment , that by that time the ritual of bagging and charity had been joined with offerings for the dead. Could you explain that a bit?

Yeah, Of course the Feast of All Saints and All Souls are in their own ways remembrances of the dead. And it's important to remember that most holidays revolve around rituals of sharing or distributing food. But we do have evidence in Shakespeare in Two Gentlemen of Verona that there was an established tradition of beggars at Hallomass. Obviously an early precursor of what we now call "trick or treating".

By the eighteenth century then we go even beyond this ritual to, you're suggesting, elaborate masquerades that really became a cultural preoccupation among the English. Tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, well the history of masquerade also goes back to classical antiquity. But the British really developed a taste for it in the seventeen hundreds and it was all a matter of dressing up and acting out. The implications on the celebration of Halloween are fairly obvious. We seem to lose our inhibitions once we become anonymous behind a costume or mask.

Well that's true enough or behind a radio microphone. I don't know, but..

Oh you should see what I'm wearing.

Maybe I don't want to. You move to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a sense by perhaps picking up on this masquerade aspect by talking about how the supernatural element involving spirits of the dead or the underworld really began to wane at that point or at least for the moment waned. Why did that come about?

Well there was a supernatural element but it didn't have so much to do with death or the dead. This was the era in which Halloween was imported to North America with the great immigration that came about at the time of the Irish potato famine. And the Irish and Scottish settlers in Canada and America brought many of the old traditions but they became adapted, they became urbanized and in the late eighteen hundreds we really saw Halloween having more to do... It was really an adult holiday for young adults and with emphasis on romantic fortune telling, getting a peek at your future spouse. And there were a lot of ways to do this. A lot of the rituals involved apples and looking into mirrors, you know, at midnight. It was really fascinating. But it took on a romantic Victorian aspect without the rowdiness and social disruptions that, you know, later became associated with the holiday.

O.K., let's pick up on some of those symbols. We'll pass on the apples. You've already explained in brief what where the name Halloween came from but what about the jack-o-lantern?

Well Jack-o-lantern was a folklore figure in Ireland. He was a trickster figure and he had offended God so many times, the legend went, that when he died he was denied entrance both into heaven and into hell. The devil didn't want anything to do with him but the devil showed him a little mercy and tossed him a burning coal from the pit of Hades which he apparently caught in a hollowed-out turnip. And this was his lantern that was to guide him through his restless wanderings through eternity.

We don't picture him very often today with a turnip. We more often see him as holding a pumpkin I suppose. So maybe you could say how do we make that transition and where did the pumpkin idea come from. Does it go back to the harvest that you mentioned earlier?

Oh yes absolutely. The pumpkin is not indigenous to Ireland and Scotland. The immigrants discovered it over here and it's a lot easier... - I tried actually carving out a turnip to see what it would be like. It makes something that looks really spooky like a little shrunken head or something very pale and ghastly . But pumpkins are infinitely more adaptable to this kind of craft. And so it was a North American invention and it was equally associated with Thanksgiving as well as Halloween. In fact the earliest iconography I could find it linked specifically to Thanksgiving as a harvest effigy.

Interesting, so one of our earliest contributions, to the ritual I guess, is the pumpkin.

Oh absolutely.

O.K., Tell us a little about... I mean I think you hinted at it, but maybe you ought to direct your comments to witches and the image of witches in all of this.

America of course, or pre-America, had an obsession with witches and witchcraft. And we don't see this in the older Celtic folklore but it gradually creeped into the American celebration. And we start seeing witches, actually rather glamorous witches, not with the traditional pointed noses and hats and all dressed in black, but rather fetching Victorian Gibson Girl kind of beauties. They're all over Halloween postcards, from the turn of the twentieth century. And it's funny today, you know, because there is often so much criticism of Halloween as having something to do with Satan as more witchcraft. This is really an element of confusion because traditional Wiccan practice is pre-Christian and has nothing to do with the Christian god or the Christian devil. So people who practice modern witchcraft are often very annoyed at what they have to deal with around Halloween.

We may want to come back on that in a moment but let me ask you one transition question to kind of finish off the history. How has Halloween changed, let's say in the past couple of decades or half century in the United States?

Well trick-or-treating, especially, really only came into its own in the nineteen- fifties. It was a regional sporadic kind of thing. I was very surprised to find that in New York City the holiday associated with kids putting on costumes and begging for treats in the streets was until the very early nineteen-thirties completely associated with Thanksgiving. It was something kids looked forward to. And it was really I think the advent of television and the decision by the major candy makers to start marketing the possibilities Halloween in the 1950's... They kind of brought it together as a celebration that was fairly homogeneous all across the United States. It's interesting and at the same time to make it more of a children's event. I sensed that all along that you are suggesting adults were very heavily involved but this trend sent it more in the way of children?

Yeah, there was this steady progression from adults to children in the first part of the twentieth century. And then I think as baby boomers started to age and we all wanted to start recapturing our childhoods the opposite occurred And now it is really as much of an adult celebration as it is for kids.

I think that's right- a number of special events being held on Halloween for adults especially those who perhaps aren't responsible for taking their children around the neighborhood. So, good point. You mentioned earlier the darker side which was this association of Halloween with witches and I think you have addressed that pretty well. But sort of an extension of that argument is certain segments of the religious community coming out against Halloween. What are your thoughts on that?

Well as I've said it does make a lot of sense. People do get a lot of media time on both sides of the argument in October. But it also ties into this idea that Halloween is a particularly dangerous time for children. It is only in one regard and that has to do with traffic accidents. Of course it's a nighttime celebration. Kids are out wearing masks and costumes that can impair vision. But the idea that there is deliberate violence directed at children is kind of an urban myth that has been reinforced by Hollywood of course and all the Halloween slasher movies and things like the Tylenol poisoning scare and the Anthrax scare. And somehow I think this is just kind of a scary story we want to believe because Halloween is supposed to be about scary stories. But when you examine the statistics there's really nothing much behind this.

You didn't find anything in your research that might suggest a connection here between the celebration of Halloween and worshiping the devil.

No there are grotesque things that happen three hundred sixty-five days of the year involving violence against children and strange cults and things like that but it does not spike. Some ASPCA's do report an increased incidence of violence against especially black cats. There are some agencies that just will not put black cats up for adoption during the month of October. But that's also kind of anecdotal . But many, many researchers have gone into this thing about the dangers of Halloween and it tends to be a kind of vaporous. The very few cases of Halloween candy tampering that have surfaced have had to do with things like a father in Houston, Texas who literally poisoned his own son for insurance money and tried to blame it on you know a Halloween serial killer.

So bad people do bad things at any time. They don't need Halloween to cause them to do it.

Yeah, yeah and I think parents should just take the ordinary precautions they would take at any other time of the year. But it's a wonderful holiday. It's a hands-on holiday. It's a very American holiday in the sense that we're people that are supposed to have as our birthright the ability to re-create our lives to become anything and anyone we want and Halloween lets us play that out. And I think it's a great time to explore creativity and theatricality. And it's not surprising a very large percentage of Americans say Halloween is their favorite holiday, period.

OK great well that's a great point on which to end this so thank you, David. Happy Halloween.

Well thank you and look for you next year.

OK, that would be great. I've been speaking with David Scall, author of "Death Makes a Holiday, a Cultural History of Halloween".