From gruesome e-cards and glowing pumpkins to fancy dress parties and sanguine cocktails, Halloween is celebrated in Beijing with ever-growing enthusiasm. As an excuse to paint the town red and indulge fetishes for masks, wigs and all manner of gory paraphernalia, the annual horrorfest is obviously great value. However, despite the symbols, rituals and stories, few of the revelers, be they Chinese or expat, truly understand what and why they're celebrating.

Halloween, perhaps one of the world's strangest yearly festivals, is even stranger than it seems. Unlike Independence Day in the US, Guy Fawke's Night in the UK, or Bastille Day in France, Halloween is neither nationalistic nor historical, yet it is celebrated across the globe. Unlike Christmas, Easter or Passover, Halloween is not associated with a specific religion, yet it conjures up thoughts and images of spirituality, death and religious beliefs in our imagination.

The origins of Halloween are both complex and uncertain. Many people believe that Halloween is a pre-European-Christian holiday with Celtic roots. A common and slightly more developed version of this concept holds that Halloween is derived from the Celtic Samhain festival, which, on November 1, commemorated both the Celtic New Year and the day during which dead souls were believed to roam the Earth.

Trick-or-treating, a term which was coined fairly recently, was one of my favorite Halloween rituals in years gone by, and is likewise linked to Irish Samhain traditions. It became popular about the time that large numbers of Irish immigrants arrived in the US. During Samhain, people opened their doors and left food for the wandering dead - eventually people started dressing like wandering dead souls and demanding food for their efforts. If they received nothing then the homeowner would obviously end up on the wrong end of a prank or "trick".

Despite the growing popularity of Halloween in Beijing and across China , the country already has its own version of the festival, called the Hungry Ghost Festival (Zhong Yuan Jie), which falls in mid-August. In a striking parallel with Western Halloween, Chinese legend states that on this day starving ghosts travel the earth in search of food and money, which is why people in southern China traditionally put meat, vegetables, rice, tea and fruit on their doorsteps that day.

Source: beijing-visitor.com