Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Halloween



  1. In Mexico, they celebrate El Dia de los Muertos or the Day of the Dead, starting during the evening of October 31. People take picnics to family graves and tombs and lay out food for the deceased.



  2. The colours orange and black became Halloween colours because orange is associated with harvests, and Halloween marks the end of harvest, and black is associated with death.



  3. Black cats were originally believed to protect witches' powers from negative forces, ie the effects of prayer and the actions of the church!



  4. A pumpkin is really a squash, and comes from the same family as the cucumber. About 99% of pumpkins sold in the UK are used as lanterns at Halloween.



  5. The biggest pumpkin in the world tipped the scales at a whopping 1,446 pounds. This gigantic gourd was weighed in October 2004 at a pumpkin festival in Port Elgin, Ontario, Canada.



  6. The record for the fastest pumpkin carver in the world is Jerry Ayers of Baltimore, Ohio, who carved an entire pumpkin in just 37 seconds.



  7. The very first jack o' lanterns were made of hollowed out turnips – the pumpkin tradition was imported from the USA in the twentieth century



  8. Ringing a bell is said to scare evil spirits away and one Halloween custom is to have a person walk the streets in a costume sewn with bells.



  9. If you see a spider on Halloween, it could be the spirit of a dead loved one who is watching you, so you shouldn’t kill it.



  10. To meet a witch on Halloween, put your clothes on inside out and walk backwards around midnight.








This article was brought to you by BlueWorldGames

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