The Book of Hallowe’en

Description

In The Book of Hallowe’en by Ruth Edna Kelley you can find everything you can possibly want to know about Halloween – whether it is the religious background of the celebration, the old traditions and customs related to the holiday as they were observed in ancient times or the modern ways to celebrate Halloween, you have it all in this great book.

Ruth Edna Kelley published The Book of Hallowe’en in 1919 in Massachusetts and it was an instant success. No wonder – Kelley manages to gather an incredible quantity of information about Halloween and she organizes all her findings in an interesting way, presenting them in an entertaining and informative way. She traces the traditions of celebrating Halloween back to the holiday’s origins in Europe, describing what it meant for the ancient Britons, Scots, Welsh, Celts, Irish as well as for other peoples and she also examines the beliefs and the legends related to the end of autumn.

Kelley then moves on to more recent times, presenting how Halloween was celebrated in the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century and also explaining how Halloween absorbed numerous traditions from other holidays such as Christmas and Midsummer. To make her account even more detailed and more interesting, Kelley adds lots of poems recited to honor the period, descriptions of the games played, the methods of divination to achieve various goals such as to find out the name of one’s future spouse as well as the best way to make a jack-o’-lantern.

Detailed and informative, covering a large geographic and historical spectrum and written in an entertaining and easy to understand style, Ruth Edna Kelley’s The Book of Hallowe’en is not only the first full-length book about how the holiday is observed, but also one of the most comprehensive works on the subject so far.
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