Martine Powers
?Despite its similarities to Carnival–elaborate costumes, raucous parties, revelry in the streets–for most of the 20th century, Halloween was T&T's holiday non grata.
Of course, that's changing now: The Halloween tradition has broken out of the gated communities of Westmoorings and expanded throughout the island, with Halloween-themed parties debuting in San Fernando nightclubs and costume stores nationwide logging record October sales.
But in a country that loves it holidays and its parties, why did it take so long for Halloween to catch on?
The short answer: The weather. For centuries, the holiday has been tied to harvest festivals and a celebration of the transition from summer to winter. With near-constant temperatures throughout the year in this part of the world, there was little reason for Trinidadians to embrace Halloween, according to William Heim, a now-deceased professor of English and occult folklore at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
Caribbean islands "never really accepted older traditions like European harvest festivals," Heim told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in 1994. "Halloween did not gain wide acceptance in parts of the world nearer the equator. There is no sharp change of seasons like in northern Europe. There was no such thing as a winter festival."
Still, the holiday, or some iteration of it, has been around for at least the last two millennia.
The day has its roots in a pre-Christian Celtic tradition known as Samhain–pronounced Sah-ween–in which agricultural communities in the British Isles marked the start of a new harvest cycle. The gap between the old year and the new year, they thought, allowed the spirits of the recently-deceased a small window of time to roam amongst the living. Samhain became the largest holiday in Celtic culture: There were bonfires. There were feasts, and of course, costumes.
Fast-forward to 601 AD, when the rise of Christianity led Catholic officials to try and put a halt to the holiday, according to the American Folklife Center, an archival centre established as part of the US Library of Congress. Irked at the persistence of pagan traditions in Christian society, religious leaders hoped to find a way to convince parishioners to abandon their old celebrations, which they believed amounted to devil-worship.
Pope Gregory I came out with an edict: If you can't beat them, why not join them?
Instead of trying to squash Samhain altogether, church officials attempted to supplant it with a new, Christian holiday that would allow for the same revelry at the same time of year: All Saints Day, which came to be known as All Hallows Day, a celebration of the saints. Still, locals continued to pay respect to dark spirits the night before, in a tradition that came be known as Hallow's Evening, or Halloween.
As the American Folklife Center called it: "An ancient Celtic, pre-Christian New Year's Day in contemporary dress."
For much of the 20th century, Halloween was thought to be a distinctly American holiday. But in recent years, that's been changing–and not just in Trinidad.
In the United Kingdom, Halloween-related spending increased by a factor of 23 between 2001 and 2010, according to the BBC. A Halloween parade in Kawasaki, Japan, brought more than 12,000 participants and spectators out last week.
In 1998, acclaimed masman Roy Pierre won the J'Ouvert costume competition at New York's annual West Indian carnival with costumes that combined traditional Trinidadian folklore with contemporary American Halloween motifs: Diablesses, soucouyants, and moko jumbies appeared alongside witches, mummies, and good old-fashioned black cats.