Informative Essay On Halloween

Petrifying popcorn for Halloween

The October school holidays will soon be upon us, which can mean only one thing, the fun and frolics of Halloween will soon be hitting a town near you. The question is, will you be taking part with the usual bars of chocolates and foil wrapper sweets or will you really go to town this year and show the children how Halloween’s really done with Empire’s popcorn? We have some fun and spooky recipes to help you turn this years Halloween into a real scare fest but first things first, let’s look at Halloween and where it actually came from.

Where did Halloween come from?

Halloween straddles the line between autumn and winter, symbolic of plenty and scarcity, life and death but despite such morbid references, Halloween

We avoid crossing paths with black cats incase they bring us that dreaded bad luck. We also try our best to avoid walking under ladders for the very same reason. On top of this, we try our best to avoid breaking mirrors, stepping on cracks in the pavement and spilling salt. There are however a number of Halloween traditions that people seem to have forgotten about. The ancient traditions associated with Halloween tended to focus on the future as opposed to the past. The majority of them involved helping young women find their future husbands or in the very least reassuring the women that they would eventually, with luck, be married by the next Halloween. In the 18th Century in Ireland, a matchmaking cook would place a ring within her mashed potatoes on the night of Halloween in the hope that the diner who found it would eventually find true love. In Scotland, fortunetellers would suggest a particularly eligible young woman name hazelnuts for every one of her suitors before throwing them into the fireplace. They believed that whichever nut burned as opposed to popping or exploding would represent the woman’s future husband. For some however, the opposite was true in that the burning hazelnut represented a love that wouldn’t last. The town you lived in greatly dictated which of these you believed to be true. There were many other such tales too, for instance if a young woman ate a sugary potion of walnuts, hazelnuts and nutmeg just before she went to bed on Halloween, she would dream about her future husband and be able to identify the man she was meant to be with. Young women even tossed apple peels over their shoulders, much like we toss spilt salt, in the hopes that the peels would fall in such a way as to reveal the initials of their husbands. They also attempted to learn about their husbands by looking into the yolk of an egg floating in a bowl of water. There were