Why Do We Wear Costumes and Go Trick-or-Treating on Halloween?
Some historians link the present-day Halloween custom of wearing costumes and going trick-or-treating with the medieval practices of "mumming" and "going a-souling" on the eves of All Saints and All Souls Days (November 1 and 2). Mumming took the form of wearing costumes, singing, play-acting, and mischief making, while souling entailed going door to door and offering prayers for the dead in exchange for treats, particularly "soul cakes."
Another likely progenitor was the British custom, dating from the 1600s, of youths wearing masks and carrying effigies while begging for pennies on Bonfire Night (also known as Guy Fawkes Night), the November 5 commemoration of the so-called Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament in 1605.
Despite the obvious similarities, however, there is little to no evidence of a direct line of succession or process of evolution from those earlier practices to the Halloween customs we know today. By the mid-1800s, when Irish immigrants brought the holiday to North America, mumming and souling were all but forgotten. Most Americans had no idea who Guy Fawkes was, let alone why anyone should go begging for "pennies for the Guy." And although Halloween had earned a permanent spot on the American calendar by the turn of the 20th century, one finds no mention of trick-or-treating or anything like it in published sources earlier than 1939.
One does find mention -- many mentions, in fact -- of unrestrained pranksterism and vandalism in connection with Halloween festivities from the late 1800s on, thus one current theory holds that trick-or-treating was contrived by adults to provide an orderly alternative to juvenile mischief.
Whatever its precise origin, trick-or-treating was an established Halloween tradition by the 1940s and remains so to this day.
