long essay about halloween

How to Write a Spooky Essay on Halloween: Tips, Topics, and Examples

In contemporary society, individuals continue to appreciate traditional festive events, with Halloween being a prime example. Common elements found in every Halloween celebration encompass:

• Donning Halloween costumes.
• Carving pumpkins.
• Sharing spooky stories.
• Exploring haunted houses.
• Participating in trick-or-treating, and more.

Regardless of the academic task at hand, such as a science fair project or a presentation, the ultimate goal is often to achieve the highest grade. If you find yourself tasked with composing a Halloween essay, our coursework help service offers compelling ideas to ensure your essay stands out.

What Is a Halloween Essay

A Halloween essay is a written composition that explores and discusses various aspects related to Halloween, the popular festive celebration observed on October 31st. In such an essay, writers may delve into the history and origins of Halloween, cultural and societal traditions associated with the holiday, personal experiences and memories, or even explore the significance of Halloween in literature, film, or art.

The essay about Halloween may encompass a range of themes, from the spooky and supernatural elements often associated with Halloween to the more lighthearted aspects such as costumes, decorations, and traditional activities like trick-or-treating. Ultimately, a Halloween essay provides an opportunity for writers to express their thoughts, reflections, and insights related to this widely celebrated and unique holiday.

Halloween Essay Step-By-Step Writing Tips

Does the mere thought of tackling your homework send shivers down your spine? Certainly, similar to any academic task, crafting an essay on Halloween demands a sense of responsibility. Adhere to the key points outlined in our checklist, an integral component of our custom dissertation writing service .

Explore Halloween Essay Ideas for Your Topics

The versatility of Halloween essays allows for creativity in choosing topics. Crafting a compelling narrative that keeps readers engaged is key to success. Striking a balance between eerie elements and informative content is crucial. Consider sharing the history of trick-or-treat bags, recounting a mystical and spine-chilling personal experience, or even writing a book review on Halloween literature.

Conduct Thorough Research

To impress your audience with intriguing ideas and captivating details, delve into background information. Utilize old books or online resources, ensuring the credibility of your sources. Watching spooky movies or immersing yourself in Halloween stories can further enrich your essay with authentic and compelling content.

Adhere to a Structured Approach

While the theme is Halloween, maintaining a structured academic format is essential. Even in the realm of a Halloween essay, academic rules of how to write coursework still make a difference. Follow the conventions of scholarly writing, including a well-crafted thesis statement, an engaging introduction, a detailed body, and a conclusive conclusion. The thesis statement should succinctly encapsulate the main idea of your Halloween essay, setting the tone for the subsequent paragraphs.

Halloween Essay Example

Here is a nice sample of the Halloween essay for you.

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Halloween Essay Types

If you're aiming for top grades and the approval of your teachers, adhere to their specifications for the Halloween essay. Typically, they outline the desired type of work, which may fall into the following categories:

Narrative Halloween Essay

Crafting a narrative Halloween essay involves recounting a series of events, whether real or imaginary. For instance, share the details of your most recent Halloween as an illustration. Alternatively, let your imagination run wild and pen a story about an encounter with a haunted house.

Descriptive Halloween Essay

True to its name, a descriptive Halloween essay provides a detailed portrayal of the chosen topic. Narrate a story aligned with the theme of your Halloween costume, or delve into the intricacies of the jack-o-lantern you intricately carved during a festive gathering.

Informative Halloween Essay

If your goal is to impart knowledge, consider composing an informative essay. This Halloween paper can encompass details about the holiday's history or traditions. Explore topics such as the origins of spooky costumes, the significance of lighting bonfires, or the cultural variations in celebrations among different European ethnic groups.

Halloween Writing Prompt Ideas

Looking for inspirational Halloween essay ideas? Look no further! We present a compilation of compelling Halloween essay topics, and undoubtedly, at least one of these essay examples is sure to resonate with you.

Spooky Topics for a Short Essay About Halloween

People are drawn to narratives that evoke spine-chilling sensations, making a scary Halloween essay particularly appealing to readers. While an essay on "why Halloween is the best holiday" is fitting, there are numerous other ideas to explore:

• The ghostly origins of Halloween: Unraveling the historical roots of Halloween's spookiness.
• Exploring the mysteries within the infamous haunted house on Elm Street.
• What makes midnight on Halloween so bewitching?
• The legend of the headless horseman.
• The dark side of trick-or-treating: Examining the potential dark undertones of the seemingly innocent tradition of trick-or-treating.
• Have you heard the chilling tales of costumes carrying mysterious curses?
• Tracing the eerie history behind the tradition of carving jack-o'-lanterns.
• Spirits among us: Ghost stories of Halloween.
• Discovering the mysteries within the deserted grounds of Halloween carnivals left in abandonment.
• The enigmatic black cat: superstitions and folklore.

Best 5 Paragraph Essay About Halloween Ideas

Typically, a standard essay comprises approximately five sections. This structure enables the writer to convey their message concisely. Hence, select Halloween writing topics that can be effectively explored within a few paragraphs.

• How have Halloween traditions evolved over time?
• What makes haunted houses a compelling journey into fear?
• How have Halloween costumes transitioned from tradition to trend?
• What ghostly legends define the essence of Halloween?
• Is trick-or-treating a sweet tradition or a dark deception?
• How has the tradition of carving jack-o'-lanterns evolved through history?
• How does Halloween manifest in literature and film as a spooky spectacle?
• What psychological aspects drive fear during Halloween?
• How does Halloween celebrate cultural variations around the world?
• How has Halloween been shaped by popular culture?

Awesome Topics for an Essay About the Halloween Festival

If you have a penchant for various celebrations, you might consider crafting an essay about them. Explore a variety of Halloween essay options:

• The history and origins of the Halloween festival.
• Haunted attractions: A thrill or a frightening experience?
• Costumes through time: Evolution of Halloween dressing.
• Trick-or-treating: Innocent tradition or modern concern?
• Carving tradition: The cultural significance of Jack-o'-Lanterns.
• Halloween in popular culture: Depictions in movies and literature.
• Cultural diversity in Halloween celebrations around the world.
• Halloween and superstitions: Folklore and beliefs.
• DIY Halloween decor: Crafting spooky ambiance at home.
• Halloween and commercialization: Is the spirit lost in consumerism?

Creepy Ideas for Essay on Halloween Parties

• Can you unravel the mystique of Halloween parties?
• Eerie elegance – transforming spaces into hauntingly beautiful venues.
• How can you explore spooky and tasty Halloween party recipes?
• Whispering walls: How does ghostly décor send shivers down your spine?
• Setting the right tone with a spine-chilling playlist.
• Costume chronicles: The psychology behind creepy costumes.
• Haunted games and activities: How to ensure goosebumps and laughter coexist.
• Witch's brew and potions – crafting sinister cocktails for all to sip.
• Ghostly guests – The art of inviting spirits to your Halloween bash?
• The witching hour: The secrets to hosting a truly unforgettable midnight soirée.

Scary Halloween History Essay Ideas

Do you need to set a deadline for composing your essay on the history of Halloween? Undoubtedly, understanding the origins of beloved holidays is crucial for expanding your worldview and knowledge. If you're contemplating what to include in your paper, here are some suggestions for your history of Halloween essay:

• The Witch Trials: How did the fear of witches shape Halloween's dark history?
• Origins of Trick-or-Treating: Can you trace the spooky roots of this beloved tradition?
• Eerie tales and legends that contribute to Halloween's mystique.
• How did disguising oneself become an integral part of Halloween?
• Ancient rituals laid the foundation for modern Halloween.
• What's the history behind carving frightening faces on pumpkins?
• How did Halloween become intertwined with the supernatural?
• What led to the Christian influence on this pagan festival?
• Documented accounts of paranormal activity on Halloween.
• Commercialization of Fear: How did the Halloween industry turn fright into a lucrative business?

Top Essay Topics on Trick-or-Treating and Other Halloween Traditions

If you have an affinity for Halloween traditions, exploring an essay on this subject could be captivating. Choose from the Halloween paper ideas we provide below:

• How has this Halloween tradition transformed over time?
• What role do community interactions play in the trick-or-treating experience?
• How do different cultures incorporate trick-or-treating into their Halloween festivities?
• DIY Halloween Treats: What are some creative and spooky homemade treats for trick-or-treaters?
• How do costumes contribute to the overall trick-or-treating experience?
• Alternative Halloween Celebrations – Non-traditional ways to celebrate Halloween without trick-or-treating.
• Trick-or-Treating Etiquette: Do's and don'ts for both givers and receivers during Halloween.
• How can communities ensure a safe environment for trick-or-treaters?
• Historical Roots of Halloween: How did trick-or-treating become intertwined with this ancient celebration?
• Exploring the irresistible charm of Halloween traditions.

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Spooking Up

In conclusion, the possibilities for a Halloween essay are limitless. Embracing all the suggestions can turn the writing process into a surprisingly enjoyable endeavor. Consider the subjects you wish to explore, choose the most captivating topic, and embark on creating an exemplary assignment!

Related Articles

Halloween Essay: How to Write, Topics and Essay Ideas

So, there are a few days left before Halloween, one of the favorite American holidays both for kids and adults. Most probably, your teacher will ask to prepare a Halloween essay. And most probably, it is not the first Halloween essay that you need to prepare.

Our specialists will write a custom essay specially for you!

We are sure that right now your head is busy with ideas for a Halloween party, your costume, some tricks, and so on. You absolutely do not feel like writing your Halloween essay, although the topic is fascinating.

Yet, even really amazing topics should be properly covered. Let Custom-writing.org offer you several ways of completing your Halloween essay, which will not take too much time and efforts.

🔝 Top 10 Halloween Essay Ideas

• Your favorite Halloween specials 
• What traditions define Halloween? 
• What makes trick-or-treating dangerous? 
• Why are apples associated with Halloween? 
• How does Halloween impact the economy? 
• Different Halloween customs around the world 
• The difference between Samhain and Halloween 
• The effect of media in the popularization of Halloween 
• How has the Halloween celebration evolved over time? 
• How has religion contributed to Halloween’s development? 

Writing Halloween Essays: Way #1

Imagine that you have a friend who lives in a country where Halloween is not popular, and you have to tell him/her about the holiday. You can use general facts, your knowledge, and experience to complete the Halloween essay in this way.

Here are some points to include into your Halloween essay for a foreign friend:

• Say a few words about the origins of Halloween;
• Talk about the tradition of carving pumpkins. Add a couple of pictures.
• Tell how people celebrate Halloween . Give details on how people decorate their houses and yards, how they choose costumes, how kids do trick-or-treating, how Halloween parties are organized.

Writing Halloween Essays: Way #2

Another easy and exciting way to prepare a Halloween essay is to make up a scary story. Think about a good idea for your story involving ghosts, witches, dead men. Mind that descriptions, vivid details will make your Halloween essay more impressive.

Just in 1 hour! We will write you a plagiarism-free paper in hardly more than 1 hour

Your Halloween essay can also be based on your personal experience (sure, you can make up some details). It can be something like “Last Halloween, I and two other guys decided to visit that old, abandoned house that was believed to be haunted. As it turned out, ghosts were there!”

Our tips for writing remembered event essays and a narration essay might be useful.

Learn more on this topic:

• Coral Reef Essay: Descriptive Writing How-to Guide
• Best Descriptive Essays That Win Top Marks
• Harriet Tubman Essay: How to Write, Prompts and Ideas
• Americanism Essay Writing: How-to Guide, Tips, Topics
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i really needed this and i have a presentation in a few days and i really needed a speech for my project thanks!!

Everybody loves HALLOWEEN and your article is really good one 😀

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Thanks so much for interesting ideas for my Halloween essay. Though it is too early to write about Halloween, but this is my favorite holiday, and I can’t but dedicate my paper to it! Good luck!

When I was given to write an essay about my favorite holiday, I chose Halloween. In your article on writing Halloween essays, I found lots of fascinating ideas for my paper. Thanks for them very much!

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Halloween 2024

By: History.com Editors

Updated: January 31, 2024 | Original: November 18, 2009

Halloween is a holiday celebrated each year on October 31, and Halloween 2024 will occur on Thursday, October 31. The tradition originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain , when people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off ghosts. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III designated November 1 as a time to honor all saints. Soon, All Saints Day incorporated some of the traditions of Samhain. The evening before was known as All Hallows Eve, and later Halloween. Over time, Halloween evolved into a day of activities like trick-or-treating, carving jack-o-lanterns, festive gatherings, donning costumes and eating treats.

When Is Halloween 2024?

Halloween is celebrated each year on October 31. Halloween 2024 will take place on Thursday, October 31.

Ancient History of Halloween

Halloween’s origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts , who lived 2,000 years ago, mostly in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1.

This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31 they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth.

In addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort during the long, dark winter.

To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities. During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other’s fortunes.

When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.

Did you know? One quarter of all the candy sold annually in the U.S. is purchased for Halloween.

By A.D. 43, the Roman Empire had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the 400 years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain.

The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple, and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of bobbing for apples that is practiced today on Halloween.

All Saints' Day

On May 13, A.D. 609, Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome in honor of all Christian martyrs, and the Catholic feast of All Martyrs Day was established in the Western church. Pope Gregory III later expanded the festival to include all saints as well as all martyrs, and moved the observance from May 13 to November 1.

By the 9th century, the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands, where it gradually blended with and supplanted older Celtic rites. In A.D. 1000, the church made November 2 All Souls’ Day, a day to honor the dead. It’s widely believed today that the church was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, church-sanctioned holiday.

All Souls’ Day was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels and devils . The All Saints’ Day celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints’ Day) and the night before it, the traditional night of Samhain in the Celtic religion, began to be called All-Hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween.

How Did Halloween Start in America?

The celebration of Halloween was extremely limited in colonial New England because of the rigid Protestant belief systems there. Halloween was much more common in Maryland and the southern colonies.

As the beliefs and customs of different European ethnic groups and the American Indians meshed, a distinctly American version of Halloween began to emerge. The first celebrations included “play parties,” which were public events held to celebrate the harvest. Neighbors would share stories of the dead, tell each other’s fortunes, dance and sing.

Did you know? More people are buying costumes for their pets. Americans spent nearly $500 million on costumes for their pets in 2021—more than double what they spent in 2010.

Colonial Halloween festivities also featured the telling of ghost stories and mischief-making of all kinds. By the middle of the 19th century, annual autumn festivities were common, but Halloween was not yet celebrated everywhere in the country.

In the second half of the 19th century, America was flooded with new immigrants . These new immigrants, especially the millions of Irish fleeing the Irish Potato Famine , helped to popularize the celebration of Halloween nationally.

Gallery: White House Halloweens

History of Trick-or-Treating

Borrowing from European traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to house asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became today’s “trick-or-treat” tradition. Young women believed that on Halloween they could divine the name or appearance of their future husband by doing tricks with yarn, apple parings or mirrors.

In the late 1800s, there was a move in America to mold Halloween into a holiday more about community and neighborly get-togethers than about ghosts, pranks and witchcraft . At the turn of the century, Halloween parties for both children and adults became the most common way to celebrate the day. Parties focused on games, foods of the season and festive costumes.

Parents were encouraged by newspapers and community leaders to take anything “frightening” or “grotesque” out of Halloween celebrations. Because of these efforts, Halloween lost most of its superstitious and religious overtones by the beginning of the twentieth century.

Halloween Parties

By the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween had become a secular but community-centered holiday, with parades and town-wide Halloween parties as the featured entertainment. Despite the best efforts of many schools and communities, vandalism began to plague some celebrations in many communities during this time.

By the 1950s, town leaders had successfully limited vandalism and Halloween had evolved into a holiday directed mainly at the young. Due to the high numbers of young children during the fifties baby boom, parties moved from town civic centers into the classroom or home, where they could be more easily accommodated.

Between 1920 and 1950, the centuries-old practice of trick-or-treating was also revived. Trick-or-treating was a relatively inexpensive way for an entire community to share the Halloween celebration. In theory, families could also prevent tricks being played on them by providing the neighborhood children with small treats.

Thus, a new American tradition was born, and it has continued to grow. Today, Americans spend an estimated $6 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country’s second largest commercial holiday after Christmas .

Halloween Movies

Speaking of commercial success, scary Halloween movies have a long history of being box office hits. Classic Halloween movies include the “Halloween” franchise, based on the 1978 original film directed by John Carpenter and starring Donald Pleasance, Nick Castle, Jamie Lee Curtis and Tony Moran. In “Halloween,” a young boy named Michael Myers murders his 17-year-old sister and is committed to jail, only to escape as a teen on Halloween night and seek out his old home, and a new target. A direct sequel to the original "Halloween" was released in 2018, starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Nick Castle. A sequel to that, "Halloween Kills," was released in 2021; and a sequel to that, "Halloween Ends," was released in 2022.

Considered a classic horror film down to its spooky soundtrack, "Halloween" inspired other iconic “slasher films” like “Scream,” “Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Friday the 13.” More family-friendly Halloween movies include “Hocus Pocus,” “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” “Beetlejuice” and “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.” 

All Souls Day and Soul Cakes

The American Halloween tradition of trick-or-treating probably dates back to the early All Souls’ Day parades in England. During the festivities, poor citizens would beg for food and families would give them pastries called “soul cakes” in return for their promise to pray for the family’s dead relatives.

The distribution of soul cakes was encouraged by the church as a way to replace the ancient practice of leaving food and wine for roaming spirits. The practice, which was referred to as “going a-souling,” was eventually taken up by children who would visit the houses in their neighborhood and be given ale, food and money.

The tradition of dressing in costume for Halloween has both European and Celtic roots. Hundreds of years ago, winter was an uncertain and frightening time. Food supplies often ran low and, for the many people afraid of the dark, the short days of winter were full of constant worry.

On Halloween, when it was believed that ghosts came back to the earthly world, people thought that they would encounter ghosts if they left their homes. To avoid being recognized by these ghosts, people would wear masks when they left their homes after dark so that the ghosts would mistake them for fellow spirits.

On Halloween, to keep ghosts away from their houses, people would place bowls of food outside their homes to appease the ghosts and prevent them from attempting to enter.

Gallery: Halloween Costumes Through the Ages

Black Cats and Ghosts on Halloween

Halloween has always been a holiday filled with mystery, magic and superstition. It began as a Celtic end-of-summer festival during which people felt especially close to deceased relatives and friends. For these friendly spirits, they set places at the dinner table, left treats on doorsteps and along the side of the road and lit candles to help loved ones find their way back to the spirit world.

Today’s Halloween ghosts are often depicted as more fearsome and malevolent, and our customs and superstitions are scarier too. We avoid crossing paths with black cats , afraid that they might bring us bad luck. This idea has its roots in the Middle Ages , when many people believed that witches avoided detection by turning themselves into black cats.

We try not to walk under ladders for the same reason. This superstition may have come from the ancient Egyptians , who believed that triangles were sacred (it also may have something to do with the fact that walking under a leaning ladder tends to be fairly unsafe). And around Halloween, especially, we try to avoid breaking mirrors, stepping on cracks in the road or spilling salt.

Halloween Matchmaking and Lesser-Known Rituals

But what about the Halloween traditions and beliefs that today’s trick-or-treaters have forgotten all about? Many of these obsolete rituals focused on the future instead of the past and the living instead of the dead.

In particular, many had to do with helping young women identify their future husbands and reassuring them that they would someday—with luck, by next Halloween—be married. In 18th-century Ireland, a matchmaking cook might bury a ring in her mashed potatoes on Halloween night, hoping to bring true love to the diner who found it.

In Scotland, fortune-tellers recommended that an eligible young woman name a hazelnut for each of her suitors and then toss the nuts into the fireplace. The nut that burned to ashes rather than popping or exploding, the story went, represented the girl’s future husband. (In some versions of this legend, the opposite was true: The nut that burned away symbolized a love that would not last.)

Another tale had it that if a young woman ate a sugary concoction made out of walnuts, hazelnuts and nutmeg before bed on Halloween night she would dream about her future husband.

Young women tossed apple-peels over their shoulders, hoping that the peels would fall on the floor in the shape of their future husbands’ initials; tried to learn about their futures by peering at egg yolks floating in a bowl of water and stood in front of mirrors in darkened rooms, holding candles and looking over their shoulders for their husbands’ faces.

Other rituals were more competitive. At some Halloween parties, the first guest to find a burr on a chestnut-hunt would be the first to marry. At others, the first successful apple-bobber would be the first down the aisle.

Of course, whether we’re asking for romantic advice or trying to avoid seven years of bad luck, each one of these Halloween superstitions relies on the goodwill of the very same “spirits” whose presence the early Celts felt so keenly.

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How To Write A Halloween Essay? Best Advice

Halloween is an excellent time to celebrate but writing a persuasive essay on Halloween is another topic for discussion. Many college and university students find it tedious crafting such a paper and scoring low grades. To others, such an assignment is scary, and they end up not attempting it all. But should that be the case for all students? Well, our experts have prepared a tip-top guide on how to write Halloween essays that will make you a superstar. Keep reading.

What is a Halloween Essay?

It is an academic paper on Halloween that takes place on 31 st October every year. Now, Halloween is usually a night of customs filled with fun and merry-making. The Halloween tradition has rich ancient religious stories, beliefs, and history. With its origin over 2000 years ago in Celtic Ireland, the festival has developed roots in most parts of Europe.

Outline For Halloween Essays

Many students think that knowing how to write a Halloween essay introduction is all to it. Nonetheless, it would help if you had more than an understanding of one section to craft a brilliant Halloween essay sample. You will have to know the following background information first:

Origin of the Halloween festival Its significance to the communities that celebrate it The cultural and religious implications of the festival

With such knowledge, you are good to proceed to the structure of a Halloween essay which is a swift process. Like any other essay, a Halloween paper has three parts; introduction, body and conclusion. Below is a brief description of this structure:

• The introduction should contain catchy facts and ideas on Halloween that would immerse the reader into your essay. The beginning can also have proverbs, citations, some wise words, or quotes on Halloween. The thesis statement which comes in the intro should be brief and informative. Remember that the introduction paints a picture of what to expect, and as such, it should be captivating.
• The body: This is the part that explains the thesis statement in detail. It contains arguments and facts that support the main idea presented in the thesis statement. It is essential to connect every paragraph of the body logically to make your essay flow. To make this section more interesting, use vivid details and descriptions when narrating your story.
• Conclusion: It is the shortest part of your Halloween essay that wraps up your discussion. The decision should summarize the main points and restate the thesis statement. For an excellent article, ensure that your conclusion leaves a mark on your audience. Do not leave them scared and frustrated as people celebrating Halloween for the first time.

To ace your paper, you can look at the various Halloween essay example tasks online. These will give you ideas as well as tips on how to write a thrilling Halloween paper.

Halloween Essay Example

Halloween is widely celebrated in the U.S. and has a number of strange characteristics that make it similar to other rituals of reversal. Some social roles are reversed during Halloween. One example is that children hold power over adults through “trick or treat” as they can make adults give them candy and other things that they would not usually get. There are also many different costumes.

One type of costume that gets a lot of attention are the “sexy” costumes made for women and girls that are different to what they would normally wear. On a normal day no-one would wear that type of clothing but on Halloween it is OK. This is a way of everyone (particularly girls) stepping away from cultural norms and having the freedom to dress the way they want and express themselves. There are also symbolic messages behind the costumes in that they are supposed to imitate “scary” things. Anyone wearing a clown or vampire costume in everyday life would be seen as strange but on Halloween this is considered normal behavior.

Halloween can serve many functions in contemporary U.S. society. It is one of the most creative holidays in that it allows people to express themselves in costume and clothing, as well as make things and decorate their homes in an interesting way. It is also a kind of equalizing holiday because many costumes can be made at home from everyday objects, and pumpkins to carve are not expensive. In this way, everyone can join in with Halloween festivities, whereas Christmas (for example) can be very expensive with the presents and light shows. It is also an important holiday because it is fun for both children and adults – children can go to “trick or treat” whilst adults get to dress up and go to parties.

Let’s have a look at some exciting Halloween topics for your inspiration:

History of Halloween Essay Topics

• Analyze the myths behind the origins of Halloween
• Discuss the role of the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain in Halloween
• Why do people light bonfires and wear costumes during Halloween?
• Evaluate the development of the Halloween festival from the 8 th century
• What aspects of All Saints Day featured in Halloween?
• Discuss the evolution of Halloween into a day of activities
• Traditional festive gatherings that define Halloween
• Discuss how people in the United Kingdom and northern France celebrated Halloween in the 18 th century
• Why was Halloween associated with human death?
• Discuss the connection between the worlds of the living and the dead and Halloween
• The role of Celtic priests in furthering the Halloween festival
• Why did people offer crop and animal sacrifices during Halloween?
• Discuss the role of the conquest of the Roman Empire on the Celtic territory
• The role of religion in contributing to the development of Halloween
• How did Pope Gregory III contribute to the furthering of the Halloween festival?

Custom Halloween Topics For Top Performers

• Beliefs and customs of the rigid Protestant belief systems
• How did the southern colonies celebrate the Halloween festival?
• Discuss the customs of different European ethnic groups concerning Halloween
• How do the American Indians celebrate Halloween?
• The impact of coronavirus on Halloween celebrations in the United States
• How did the American version of Halloween emerge?
• Should people buy costumes for their pets during Halloween?
• Discuss the typical annual autumn festivities related to Halloween
• The role of immigration in furthering Halloween
• How did the Irish Potato Famine impact Halloween?
• The role of the media in popularizing Halloween

Fast Topics For An Informative Speech On Halloween

• Discuss the “trick-or-treat” tradition of Halloween
• What is the significance of apple parings or mirrors during Halloween?
• How neighbourly get-togethers spice up Halloween celebrations
• What is the role of pranks and witchcraft in Halloween
• Familiar games that people play during Halloween
• How newspapers and community leaders contribute to furthering Halloween
• Discuss Halloween parties in the 1920s and 1930s
• Evaluate the relationship between vandalism and Halloween
• Discuss the role of the Spooky Story Hour during Halloween
• Effects of reading many Halloween stories and poems
• The part of divination games
• Halloween and watching horror films
• Impact of visiting haunted attractions during Halloween
• Why telling scary stories to lighten up Halloween

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Halloween, Its History and Celebration

There are quite a number of holidays in the world, each having different reasons for being observed, different degrees of significance, and different levels of popularity, depending on where one is located.

Among the holidays, I am most fascinated with that which features a pumpkin lantern, scary costumes and decorations, and kids shouting “trick or treat” to their neighbors at dusk. I am talking about Halloween.

I find Halloween the most interesting among all the world holidays, mainly because it is foreign to me. I want to find out its history: how it came to be, where it originated, and how it became such a popular tradition practiced in many parts of the world. I also want to know the basic tenets surrounding its popularity and practice.

Commonly observed on the eve of October 31, Halloween is a holiday for remembering and honoring the dead. It is closely linked to All Souls’ Day (also called Hallowmas or All Hallows Days) and All Saint’ Day, which are both considered holy days in the Roman Catholic Church.

All Saints’ Day was established in the 9 th Century to honor the saints of the Christian church, whereas All Souls’ Day was established a century later to help purify the spirits of the dead. Both celebrations are said to have pagan origins (Santino, 1994a; Santino, 1994b; Lanford, n.d.).

Halloween is a very old tradition. Its origins date back from many thousand years ago. And how it is currently being celebrated is very far removed from how it used to be practiced, mainly because many cultures have added ‘flavor’ to it through the centuries. Halloween originated from the Celts.

The Celts, like many other pagans, worshipped nature. They had many gods, their favorite being the sun. They believed that the sun was the one responsible for the beautiful earth and everything that grew on it. (Landford, n.d.; Santino, 1994b).

According to Lanford, the Celts “marked the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter by celebrating a holiday in late autumn” (Lanford, n.d.). Among the holidays celebrated by the Celts is the Samhain, which heavily influenced later Halloween celebrations.

Samhain was celebrated on the eve of October 31 until the following day, November 1. The Celts believed that on the eve of Samhain, the spirits of the departed roamed the earth. As such, they offered food and drink to ward the spirits off. They also performed rituals at sacred hilltops, where they offered human and animal sacrifices.

However, when the Celtic lands were conquered by the Roman Empire by the end of the first century A.D., the Romans adopted some of the traditions of the Celts, thus creating a mixture of Celtic and Catholic religious observances.

In Britain, which used to be a part of Celtic lands, the Romans had incorporated some Samhain customs into their own pagan harvest festival, which honors Pomona, goddess of fruit trees, to make it easier for the Romans to conquer the Celts (Landford, n.d.) completely.

In areas that were not completely conquered by the Romans, like Ireland and Scotland, however, pure Celtic influences stayed on much longer. In these areas, the Samhain custom was abandoned only during the earlier part of the Middle Ages, when the locals converted to Christianity.

One of the strategies employed by the Roman Catholic Church to win over the loyalty of the converts was incorporating some customs of the conquered lands into its religious traditions. One example of this is Halloween.

In 835 AD, Pope Gregory IV replaced Samhain with All Saints’ Day. All Souls’ Day, closer in spirit to Samhain and modern Halloween, was first instituted at a French monastery in 998 and quickly spread throughout Europe.

Folk observances linked to these Christian holidays, including Halloween, thus preserved many of the ancient Celtic customs associated with Samhain (Santino, 1994a; Santino 1994b; Lanford, n.d.).

There are traditions observed during Halloweens that are believed to have no basis in Christianity. This is mainly because some of these traditions are influences of other religions and beliefs, specifically those of the Celtic tribes.

One example of this is the jack-o’-lantern, which originated from Scotland during the Medieval period. But instead of the carved up pumpkin which are used in present-day Halloween celebrations, the earlier jack-o’-lanterns were turnips.

Present Halloween festivities feature folk beliefs that have to do with death and the supernatural. Decorations during the holiday include imagery on death, like cobwebs, human skeletons, and skulls, and costumes based on supernatural beliefs, stories, and traditions, like those Dracula, White Lady, witches, werewolves, vampires, ghosts, and so on.

Even natural objects that are believed to bring bad omen, like spiders, black cats, and bats, are also featured during Halloween celebrations as either decorations or costumes. But the most celebrated of all the Halloween decorations is the jack-o’-lantern.

The jack-o’-lantern is a pumpkin that was hollowed-out and then carved to resemble a monstrous face. Inside it is a candle or a bulb, illuminating it. The jack-o’-lantern is based on British tales, which say that the soul of a dead person named Jack O’Lantern was barred from both heaven and hell and was thus condemned to roam the earth aimlessly with his lantern.

As previously mentioned, the traditional jack-o-lantern used to be carved from turnip, potato, or beet. But the turnips were not readily available in America, so the pumpkin was used as a replacement. Placed on windows, the lanterns represent the souls of the departed loved ones and served as a protection against bad spirits (Landford, n.d.; Barth, 1972)

An interesting feature of Halloween celebrations is trick or treat where children dressed as a witch, a vampire, a ghost, or any other supernatural character go from house to house to solicit candies or treats from the house owners in their neighborhood.

The children greet every house owner with the cry, “Trick or Treat.” The greeting suggests that the house owner should present them with a treat. Otherwise, some form of a prank will be committed against them.

Although ‘Trick or Treat’ still widely practiced in many Christian nations, its practice has declined to begin in the 1970s. This may be largely due to studies suggesting the negative effect of junks, like candies, on children’s health.

Moreover, many parents are now concerned about their children still going around their neighborhood after dark. What many parents do now is to accompany their children in their Trick or Treat, or have their children accompanied by a responsible adult.

Another feature of Halloween celebration is a custom party, either for kids or for adults, or both. Traditional costumes as well as costumes inspired by pop cultures, such as movie characters, and even politicians are used.

For such parties, adults often use costumes with “satirical or humorous overtones” (Lanford, n.d.; Barth, 1972). In most costume parties, best in costume contests are usually held, where the hosts or chosen judges choose among the guests the one who is wearing the best costume.

At present, Halloween is already a popular holiday, especially in Christian nations, although there was some resistance from some Christian sects, like the English Puritans who rejected the celebration of Halloween on the basis that it is a Catholic and pagan tradition. The Puritans are members of a strict Protestant sect (Lanford, n.d.; Santino, 1994b).

Despite the resistance from the Puritans, however, Halloween spread in many Christian countries in the world. Its spread was primarily ensured by the spread of Catholicism. In the United States, British colonists transplanted the observance of Halloween in Virginia and Maryland. Moreover, in the mid 19 th Century, Irish who came into the United States as immigrants likewise helped popularize Halloween throughout the United States (Lanford, n.d.).

According to Lanford, young people in the 19th and early 20th centuries tended to observe Halloween by “perpetrating minor acts of vandalism, such as overturning sheds or breaking windows” (Lanford, n.d).

The ritual of trick or tricking started sometime in the beginning of the 1930s when Halloween mischief was slowly transformed from merely perpetuating vandalistic acts, to trick or tricking in the neighborhood.

As time passed by, Halloween treats became more plentiful as the number of tricks decreased. It is believed that the trick or treat was introduced to lessen the pranks and destruction that typically accompanied the Halloween celebrations (Santino, 1994a; Santino 1994b).

In some areas, however, pranks still survived. A day before Halloween, there is such an event called Mischief Night in some areas of the United States, where vandalism sometimes got out of hand. Landford (n.d.) shares: “in Detroit, Michigan, Mischief Night — known there as Devil’s Night —provided the occasion for waves of arson that sometimes destroyed whole city blocks during the 1970s and 1980s.”

Beginning in the 1970s, Halloween has become increasingly popular. Adult celebrations of this occasion feature elaborate satirical costumes, boisterous festivities, and drunken revelry while the costume-donning kids go house to house, treat-or-tricking their neighbors, happy with the candies that they get.

At present, Halloween is one of the most celebrated Holidays in the world, with both the young ones and the adults taking part in the festivities. It is also among the most commercialized. During Halloween, costumes, masks, and decors dominate the malls and commercial centers. Restaurants and event venues also have a heyday during the celebrations. Indeed, Halloween is such a fascinating holiday.

Bibliography

Barth, Edna. (1972). Witches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts. New York: Seaburry Press.

Landford, Brent. (n.d.) “Halloween.” MSN Encarta.

Santino, Jack. (1994a). All Around the Year: Holidays and Celebrations in American Life. University of Illiois Press.

Santino, Jack. (1994b). Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life. Knoxville. University of Tennessee Press.

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78 Halloween Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best halloween topic ideas & essay examples, 📌 simple & easy halloween essay titles, 🥇 good research topics about halloween, ❓ halloween research questions.

• “Halloween” (1978): A Film Analysis Since the plot of the movies of the killer genre revolves around the murderer, it is only fair that the way his presence and actions are depicted is what makes the story horrifying.
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• Halloween: Origins and Modern Traditions There was a belief that the night before the beginning of winter, the limits between the dead and the living blurred, and ghosts returned to haunt.
• Halloween Celebration in the United States During the event, I learnt a number of factors that were very practical in increasing the level of pleasure and joy that one can derive from the festival.
• Halloween and Dia de Los Muertos Celebrations Halloween was celebrated by the Celtic inhabitants to mark the beginning of the New Year celebrations. The Druids were the priests, and the educated class of the Celtic group.
• Why Halloween Celebration Is Bad It signifies the time when the wall between the world of the dead or supernatural and the living was broken down.
• Comparing and Contrasting: Halloween to Day of the Dead
• Americans Should Abolish Halloween as a Traditional Holiday
• Comparison Between Halloween and Easter
• Is Your Kid’s Halloween Costume Safe?
• Role of Religion in Contributing to the Development of Halloween
• Why Catholics Should Not Celebrate Halloween
• Celebrating Halloween and Being an Exemplary Believer as a Paradox
• Comparing and Contrasting Between Prom Night and Halloween Night
• Discrimination Issues Appearing During Halloween
• Halloween History and Traditions: Old and New
• Racist and Culturally Oppressive Customs During Halloween in the United States
• The Reasons Why Halloween Is the Best Celebration of the Year
• The History and Origins of Halloween
• Halloween: The Gate Between the Living and the Spirit World Opens
• Role of the Conquest of the Roman Empire on the Celtic Territory
• The History and the Negative Effects of Halloween
• The Origin and Development of the Halloween Tradition
• The Past and Present of Halloween
• The Symbolism and Traditions in Halloween
• Why Keeping Halloween Traditions Is Important
• The Issue of Gender Roles During Halloween
• Finding the Definition of Halloween in Different Works of Literature
• Halloween and Day of the Dead: The Unique Difference
• The Dark History Behind Halloween
• The Role of the Media in Popularizing Halloween
• The Difference Between Samhain and Halloween
• The Effect of Media on the Popularization of Halloween
• How Has the Halloween Celebration Evolved?
• The Myths Behind the Origins of Halloween
• The Development of the Halloween Festival From the 8th Century
• The Evolution of Halloween Into a Day of Activities
• Traditional Festive Gatherings That Define Halloween
• How People in the UK and France Celebrated Halloween in the 18th Century
• Connection Between the Worlds of the Living and the Dead and Halloween
• The Role of Celtic Priests in Furthering the Halloween Festival
• The Customs of Different European Ethnic Groups Concerning Halloween
• The Impact of Coronavirus on Halloween Celebrations in the United States
• The Typical Annual Autumn Festivities Related to Halloween
• The Role of Immigration in Furthering Halloween
• Overview of the “Trick-Or-Treat” Tradition of Halloween
• What Are the Changing Halloween Costume Trends?
• Should Americans Abolish Halloween as a Traditional Holiday?
• What Are the Most Popular Halloween Movies?
• What Is the History of Halloween?
• Do Stores Have Sales Before Halloween?
• What Is the Scariest Outdoor Decoration for Halloween?
• What Are the Most Popular Halloween Sweets?
• How Is Halloween Traditionally Celebrated?
• What Are the Similarities and Differences Between Halloween and the Day of the Dead?
• Is Dracula a Popular Halloween Icon?
• What Is the Most Popular Halloween Symbol?
• What Is Better to Use on Halloween, a Mask or Makeup?
• Do You Celebrate Halloween With the Whole Family?
• Why Is Halloween Celebrated in October?
• Should Catholics Participate in Halloween?
• Are Gothic Buildings Associated With Halloween?
• Why Do Children Love Halloween?
• What Are the Myths and Legends About Halloween?
• How to Create a Budget Costume for Halloween?
• What Are the Most Questionable Celebrity Halloween Costumes of All Time?
• Why Are Pumpkins Popular on Halloween?
• Are There Racist and Culturally Repressive Halloween Customs in the United States?
• Are Sexy Halloween Costumes Appropriate?
• What Are the Best Pet Costumes for Halloween?
• The Halloween Effect and Japanese Stock Prices: Myth or Anomaly?
• What Are the Negative Effects of Halloween?
• What Do Halloween Colors Symbolize?
• What Skills Are Used When Carving Halloween Pumpkins?
• What Are Some Halloween Games for Kids?
• What Does Halloween Teach Children?
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IvyPanda . "78 Halloween Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." September 26, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/halloween-essay-topics/.

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Student Essays

Essay On Halloween | Celebration, Purpose & Importance

Halloween is a religious holiday. It offers an opportunity for religious people to honor their dead and celebrate the fact that they live on in heaven. It is a pagan festival that originated from Celtic tradition of leaving food or treats on Samhain so that wandering evil spirits could eat them instead of doing harm to people’s homes.

Essay on Halloween | Purpose, Importance, Halloween Celebration 

Halloween is a holiday celebrated on October 31. Halloween has its origins in the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when people would extinguish their hearth fires and settle in for the night, dedicating the dark hours to feasting and revelry with their ancestors who had passed into the other world.

On All Hallows Eve people trick-or-treated, wearing costumes and masks to ward off roaming ghosts. Today many people dress up in costume for Halloween parties.

Halloween falls on the last day of October every year. On this night it is believed that all evil spirits have full sway over earth. There are various stories about how Halloween started but the most popular story is about All Hallows Eve.

> >>> Related Post : Essay on Lord Ganesha Festival

It is believed that the Scottish Celts celebrated the New Year on November1. The day was dedicated to Samain, Lord of Death who visited his kingdom once a year with one hand behind his back. He searched every house for food and if any was found, he would put it in his cloak. The people put out food for him hoping that the next year would be plentiful. The place where Samain gathered his food supply is called Cnoc-an-Aingeal, the Hill of Angels. It is believed that on this hill fairies gather every Halloween night.

The next day known as All Hallows Day was celebrated by the Christians who wanted to thank God for preventing the Devil from plundering their food. They also prayed so that the dead would not return to earth on the holy day of All Saints.

The story of Christianity is interwoven with Halloween because it is believed that in 312 A.D., Constantine, after his victory over Maxentius, came to Rome and saw a vision of the Cross in the sky with the words, “In hoc signo vinces” (By this sign you will conquer). The next day he saw an Angel who told him to use this cross as his banner. Constantine ordered that all soldiers paint on their shields this symbol before they went into battle. He led his troops to victory against his enemy, so he kept the day sacred. This day is now known as St. George’s Day and it has been celebrated by Christians ever since.

Halloween was first introduced to America by Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century who called it “Samhain”. As time passed, people started to dress up like ghosts, goblins and witches. In the late nineteenth century, Americans started to decorate their houses with skeletons and face masks to ward off evil spirits.

They also carved turnips into lanterns called Jack-O-Lanterns that had a candle inside them. Today pumpkins are used as jack-o-lanterns instead of turnips. People also started to wear costumes and masks and it became a night for tricks and pranks as well as scares.

Halloween is now celebrated all over the world by both children and adults. It is usually celebrated on October 31st every year although some people celebrate it on November 1st or even on the last day of August. It is seen as a night of magic.

Children dress up in costume, go house to house trick-or-treating for candy and money. Trick-or-treating originated from the Celtic tradition of leaving food or treats on Samhain so that wandering evil spirits could eat them instead of doing harm to people’s homes.

Some people dress up as ghosts or goblins and go singing door-to-door. These people are called “guisers”. On All Hallows Eve, bonfires are lit to ward off evil spirits. Fireworks are also set off on that night, to scare the spirits away.

The Samhain festival is dedicated to the dead and welcome the new spirits who have come to spend the winter with their families. This is a night of light and darkness, for on that night it is believed that the boundary between this world and the other world becomes blurred. Souls from the other side are allowed to visit their loved ones again.

In parts of England people celebrate Halloween by going from house to house singing songs about Jack-O-Lanterns and asking for food in return. If they are given nothing they would put a curse on the householder.

Stories are told of witches, ghosts, demons and goblins who come out at Halloween to cause mischief or play evil tricks on humans. These spirits have various names but they are all known to be evil. Samhain is a national holiday in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and a civic holiday in Canada.

It is celebrated by most countries that were part of British Isles. In Scotland Samhain is not celebrated as it has its own Harvest festival called Hallowe’en (The Eve of All Hallows). The United States has come to celebrate Halloween more than Samhain.

In the United States, children dress up like ghosts or goblins and go door-to-door singing songs for candy. Some people tell scary stories about ghosts and goblins while others tell stories of horror. Some people play jokes on their neighbors on Halloween night.

Halloween falls on October 31st every year. It is seen as a night of magic with ghosts and witches flying around the streets with trick-or-treaters trying to get candy from their neighbors. Halloween has been celebrated for over 1,000 years. It was originally a Druid holiday called Samhain which marked the end of the harvest season and honored the dead.

This holiday is celebrated all over the world especially in countries that were once part of British Isles like Ireland, England, Canada and Australia among others. It is also celebrated by people who practice Voodoo or Santeria.

>>> Related Post: Essay on Dussehra Festival 

Halloween is a popular holiday all over the world especially in countries that were once part of British Isles, United States and those where Voodoo or Santeria is practiced. In most countries of the world Halloween falls on October 31st every year. It is a night of magic with ghosts, witches and goblins seen flying around the streets trick-or-treating for candy and money.

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Essays on Halloween

Spooky season is the best season, and you can use your Halloween essay as an opportunity to delve deeper into the origins and traditions of this boo-tiful holiday. Halloween also referred to as All Hallows' Eve, is a holiday that originated in Ireland, where it was called Samhain. Some Halloween essays concentrate primarily on the Celtic origins of this holiday, while other essays on Halloween explore modern-day practices and traditions. Halloween is celebrated annually on October 31. It was believed that on this day evil spirits roamed free, so people were putting on costumes to trick the spirits into leaving people alone. Nowadays Halloween is celebrated by dressing up in costumes, trick-or-treating, carving jack-o-lanterns, and eating candy. Use Halloween essay samples below to gather more information about Halloween for your essays. We compiled only the best essay samples for you to check out!

Harry Potter: A Story of Marginalization and Hope Because of their universality and magic, the Harry Potter series and stories are exceptional. It revolves around an outcast young boy. Harry Potter is a young kid. Outcasts have been viewed as a relegated and undesirably typecast community throughout history. The story depicts...

Cosplay is seen differently by many people; for others, it is a way of life, and for others, it is a sport. If you have engaged in cosplay or not, it has become common in today's culture. Labor and a significant amount of time are expended in creating these costumes...

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In a small remote town in Chicago Illinois There is an old legend that has been passed from one technology to another. The story is narrated to kids by their parents at night time to scare them during Halloween so that they do not wander far away from their homes. The Actual...

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Halloween Essay: What it is All About?

Mistakes to avoid in your essay on halloween, how to write halloween essay effectively, halloween essay by a professional.

Halloween is the time when people celebrate their lives and honor the dead. It is an amazing holiday that helps fight your fears, get away from your problems, and just have fun with your friends and family. Halloween is one of the most popular holidays both among kids and adults and is celebrated on 31st, October. Halloween essay is not just about costumes and fun but about customs and symbolism.

Halloween is a perfect celebration time and absolute opposite to all winter holidays such as New Year’s Eve and Christmas. Various groups of people like to celebrate this holiday in their own way but some features are common and can be seen in all countries where this holiday has its history.

In your Halloween essay you can tell about people honoring their dead relatives. Most of us love this time, we love wearing ridiculous costumes and party, while kids tricking their neighbours. One needs to provide a proper research for essay writing about Halloween and our experts will share  some tips about this type of assignment for free.

• Define the tense

Lots of students often forget about one important thing. It is important to identify the tense of your essay on Halloween. Decide if you will use either past or present tense. Use it through the entire paper.

• Analysis is more important than the plot

It is not always a good idea to build your Halloween paper around a scary or fan story. Your main topic should have some analytical perspective. This is an essay but not a narrative one.

• Incomplete sentences

It is easy to come up with various ideas for your Halloween party . But it is not an easy task to write your Halloween paper. Fortunately, there are lots of interesting topics related to this holiday, all you need to do is just to check few of our tips before you start writing:

• Imagine you are writing to a pen pal

This one is hard to connect to your main thesis . If you never had a pen pal it is easy to imagine you have one. Now you are writing him or her a letter telling your Halloween story. The main thing to imagine is the fact that your friend lives in the area where this holiday is not popular or even unknown.

Just tell some general facts about the celebration and customs. There is no need to explain all the details, just describe the overall mood and purpose of the holiday. Here are few tips to consider:

• Tell a bout the history of the holiday ;
• Describe what a pumpkin carving looks like;
• Count All Hallows' Eve celebration stages;
• Describe what costumes people like to wear and how they are decorating their houses;
• Mention some party organization facts.
• Tell a spooky tale

This is often the easiest way to start and proceed with your Halloween paper. The best way is not to retel some well-known story but to come up with your own. Good stories about Halloween always have dead people, ghosts, cemeteries, witches, and magic in their plot.

Of course, you can base your story on a personal experience. Do not forget to include various details and describe the atmosphere as it will make your paper more interesting. If you do not have nothing interesting enough, you can tell about your previous year All Hallows' Eve celebration.

This is a great time of the year. The celebration itself is some sort of a masquerade and religious rituals. It is a time to honour your relatives, visit your friends, and just be happy that you are alive and well.

And sometimes there is just not enough time to party, especially if you are a student. You just do not have time to deal with all that academic assignments . Here is a perfect chance to check services provided by professional writers . It is the easiest way to get a paper done and save some time for yourself.

Those tips our experts have prepared in this article are useful enough to be considered as your main guide for this type of an assignment. Also, you are free to experiment and try your own methods. Our professional writers are always ready to help you out anytime.

Halloween Essay Examples

We have 10 free papers on halloween for you, essay examples, essay topics, the history and origins of halloween.

Halloween’s origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom, and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1. This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the…

The Roots of the Halloween

Halloween’s roots can date back more than 2,000 years ago when the Celts participated in their holiday called “Samhain.” The basis of the holiday was to celebrate the upcoming months of darkness, when deceased loved ones would come back and greet the living. Unfortunately, when opening the gates to the mortal world, other entities would…

An Analysis of Halloween as Looming and Blair

Halloween is looming and Blair, my four year old great-niece, has been talking about it for weeks. She told me, confidentially, quietly whispering in my ear, that this year shes going as Cinderella. Im sure I frowned upon hearing the news. I was hoping for Xena, Warrior Princess or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But no,…

Americans Should Abolish Halloween as a Traditional Holiday

American Culture

Every year when the fall season comes around, Halloween does too. People prepare for the festivities by decorating their homes with spooky, haunting decorations. Everyone that participates wears costumes of all sorts. Some costumes are fun, scary, or just ridiculously unique. I question Halloween as a holiday. It serves no extraordinary purpose. It also contradicts…

Argumentative Essay About Halloween

Have you ever wondered about the origins of children in costumes roaming door-to-door for treats, or why we carve pumpkins into jack-o-lanterns? The word “HALLOWEEN Essay” actually comes from the Celtic language of Ireland. It comes from a contraction of “All Hallow’s Eve”, the evening before All Saint’s Day, November 1, which is celebrated in…

Halloween: Origins, Meaning & Traditions

The Celtic people of Ireland celebrated a festival called Samhain, which means the end of summer. During this time crops were harvested and animals were slaughtered to prepare for the long, cold winter. The Celtics belived that the worlds between the dead and the living could communicate because the air was the thinnest during this…

Halloween Storm Essay (685 words)

Halloween Storm Essay 1991The Storms beginningIt was Halloween Eve 1991, the weather was crisp and pleasant in western Massachusetts and New England. However, it was not the children that would be playing tricks on the people of this region, it was instead nature. The day before a storm of surprising intensity hadbrought waves of 25…

Halloween: A Groundbreaking Film Essay

Halloween: A Groundbreaking Film Essay Halloween was, and still is, a classic horror movie for three simple reasons: originality, flattery, and durability. Upon its release in 1978, Halloween set a new standard for horror movies, proving that it was possible to create genuine chills without excessive amounts of blood, overpaid actors, or a gigantic budget….

Spanish-English Halloween Story Essay

On the eve of All Saints’ Day, a young boy went to a casa de los fantasmas. Outside, there were esqueletos hanging on the walls. He was wearing glow-in-the-dark mascara, carrying a calavera in one hand, and a saco in the other. His disfraz masked his miedo. He only wished he had carried a linterna…

Halloween Essay

Halloween is the best holiday of the year, and should be more actively worshipped than all the rest of the holidays. This is because Halloween relieves people form the stress of everyday life, Halloween was originally a Wiccan holiday, and because on Halloween the television stations play all the good horror movies. Halloween is the…

Check a number of top-notch topics on Halloween written by our professionals

The Issue of Gender Roles During Halloween

Halloween and Day of The Dead: The Unique Difference

The Origin and Development of The Halloween Tradition

Finding The Definition of Halloween in Different Works of Literature

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Essay on Halloween / What is Helloween festival?

Introduction to halloween.

An essay on Halloween: Halloween is a fantastic opportunity to get together with friends and family for some spooky fun ! Halloween is celebrated in a variety of ways, but one of the most popular is trick-or-treating. Trick-or-treating is a Halloween tradition in which children, and occasionally adults, dress up in costumes and go door to door in their neighborhood asking for candy.

Many individuals also use Halloween decorations such as ghosts, goblins, and witches to decorate their homes. Halloween is a great time for everyone to have a good time!

Origin of Halloween

The 31st of October is Halloween. All Hallows’ Eve is also known as All Saints’ Eve. This is because some believe the holiday has its origins in a Christian celebration commemorating the deceased.

Others claim that the celebration has its origins in Ireland’s old harvest season rituals. However, in the United States, the focus is less on remembrances of the fallen and more on agriculture. It involves children dressing up in frightening costumes and going door to door begging for candy. Trick-or-treating is the term for this.

Customs associated with Halloween

Halloween is a worldwide holiday that is observed by many individuals. People celebrate Halloween for a variety of reasons, but one of the most common is that it is a time to dress up in costumes and have a good time. Many people think that ghosts and other supernatural entities come out to haunt the living on Halloween. For these reasons, Halloween is an exciting and enjoyable holiday for both children and adults.

Children commonly say “Trick or Treat” when knocking on a door or ringing the doorbell. The “trick” component is a ruse, implying that if the youngsters aren’t provided something tasty, they will conduct a prank. The children are subsequently given candies, raisins, or some other food treat by the homeowners.

Many homeowners adorn their homes in anticipation of the occasion, letting children know that they are welcome to ring the bell for candy. Jack-o’-lanterns, which are pumpkins with faces carved into them and candles inside, are common decorations.

When Halloween was first celebrated among the ancient Christians, Jack-o’-lanterns were supposed to ward off evil spirits. Originally, turnips were used instead of pumpkins. Black is a color that is frequently used in decorating.

• Khatte ko english me kya kahte hai?
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Essay on Burning Man festival

What is scary about Halloween?

Halloween is a worldwide celebration that is observed in many nations. People dress up in costumes and go door to door asking for candy. Many individuals watch horror movies and relate to spooky stories during this season.

Halloween is a pleasant and exciting time for some people. For others, though, it can be a frightening and stressful moment. Here are a few factors that can make Halloween a frightening experience for some people:

• horror movies: Many people watch horror movies during Halloween. These movies can be very scary and may give people nightmares.
• scary stories: People also like to tell scary stories during Halloween. These stories can be about ghosts, witches, and other scary creatures.
• costumes: Some people wear scary costumes during Halloween. This can be scary for young children and people who are not used to seeing people in costumes.
• decorations: Many people put up Halloween decorations, such as ghosts, witches,

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Halloween — The Origin and Development of the Halloween Tradition

The Origin and Development of The Halloween Tradition

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In 1960, when my world turned upside down

The demise of Bill Domjan's Plymouth just starts his story. He explains in his reader essay. Credit: Charles Thompson

After recently being hired as an engineer at the Sperry Gyroscope Company in Lake Success, I owned a new car for the first time. And there it was, my practically brand new 1959 Plymouth sedan, lying upside down on the shoulder of the Long Island Expressway.

My friend Charlie was there, camera in hand, saying, “Willy, you gotta do a handstand — it will make a great picture.” Then, two older women from streets adjoining the construction area walked over to ask if anybody had been hurt. When I said there were no injuries, one woman nodded knowingly and said, “Ah, they must have been good Catholics.” Well, not true.

Let’s turn back the calendar. It’s September 1960. The previous night, I had bought a bottle of vodka and planned to drink screwdrivers (orange juice and vodka) at a party in Forest Hills with my date, Jan.

However, unfamiliar with the effects of orange-flavored vodka, I became a “screwed driver” when we left the affair for our homes in Floral Park in my unseat-belted car. (Seat belts were not required then.)

Then it happened. While driving near the Grand Central Parkway exit, my eyes slowly closed, and my beautiful car hurtled up an immense pile of recently excavated earth (the LIE was still under construction). It rolled over in midair and came crashing down on the roof, the windshield shattering before my bloodshot and now wide-open eyes.

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Jan and I were left lying upside down inside on the ceiling, amazingly unscathed. We crawled from the wreck, and soon the police arrived, requesting my license and registration. Unfortunately, my wallet was in the trunk, and when it was opened — it now opened down — my basketball also fell out and I had to chase it down the LIE. (It seemed important at the time.) I gave the police the requested documents, and they gave me a ticket for “Failure to maintain control of a motor vehicle.”

Later that night, about 1 a.m., Jan and I got a ride home from a passerby. My car was left there, not blocking traffic and safely off the road, resting on its roof.

And now, not many hours after the accident, Charlie drove me back to the wreck and set about taking “the picture.” Ironically, lying near the car was a booklet that came with my vodka bottle: “How to Have a Vodka Party.”

A few days later, the car was junked, and although my car’s story ended, the picture’s story had just begun. I would periodically ask Charlie about it, and he’d say, “Yeah, I’ll find it one of these days.”

Eventually, I got married, had kids, and when they were grown, I told them of my misadventure and of the picture taken but never seen. After that, whenever my daughter, Bobbi, saw “Uncle Charlie,” she would ask about the picture, and he would tell her what he always told me, “Yeah, one of these days.”

Then at my son Stephen’s wedding reception in 1996, Charlie made a presentation — not to Stephen and his wife, Pamela — but to Bobbi, of a poster-size blowup of her father standing on his hands in front of his 1959 Plymouth resting on its roof.

The photo had been taken 36 years earlier, and I wasn’t sure it ever existed. But it did and now it hangs in my den, reminding me of that crazy night from the distant past.

Reader Bill Domjan lives in Melville.

SEND AN ESSAY about life on Long Island (about 550 words) to [email protected] . Essays will be edited and may be republished in all media. Include your full name, address and telephone numbers.

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The Hidden-Pregnancy Experiment

By Jia Tolentino

Shortly after I became pregnant with my second child, in the fall of 2022, I decided to try a modest experiment. I wanted to see whether I could hide my pregnancy from my phone. After spending my twenties eagerly surveilling and sharing the details of my life online, I had already begun trying to erect some walls of technological privacy: I’d deleted most apps on my phone and turned off camera, location, and microphone access for nearly all of the ones that I did have; I had disabled Siri—I just found it annoying—and I didn’t have any smart devices. For the experiment, I would abide by some additional restrictions. I wouldn’t Google anything about pregnancy nor shop for baby stuff either online or using a credit card, and neither would my husband, because our I.P. addresses—and thus the vast, matrixed fatbergs of personal data assembled by unseen corporations to pinpoint our consumer and political identities—were linked. I wouldn’t look at pregnancy accounts on Instagram or pregnancy forums on Reddit. I wouldn’t update my period tracker or use a pregnancy app.

Nearly every time we load new content on an app or a Web site, ad-exchange companies—Google being the largest among them—broadcast data about our interests, finances, and vulnerabilities to determine exactly what we’ll see; more than a billion of these transactions take place in the U.S. every hour. Each of us, the data-privacy expert Wolfie Christl told me, has “dozens or even hundreds” of digital identifiers attached to our person; there’s an estimated eighteen-billion-dollar industry for location data alone. In August, 2022, Mozilla reviewed twenty pregnancy and period-tracking apps and found that fifteen of them made a “buffet” of personal data available to third parties, including addresses, I.P. numbers, sexual histories, and medical details. In most cases, the apps used vague language about when and how this data could be shared with law enforcement. (A 2020 FOIA lawsuit filed by the A.C.L.U. revealed that the Department of Homeland Security had purchased access to location data for millions of people in order to track them without a warrant. ICE and C.B.P. subsequently said they would stop using such data.) The scholar Shoshana Zuboff has called this surveillance capitalism , “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales.” Through our phones, we are under perpetual surveillance by companies that buy and sell data about what kind of person we are, whom we might vote for, what we might purchase, and what we might be nudged into doing.

A decade ago, the sociology professor Janet Vertesi conducted a more rigorous form of the hidden-pregnancy experiment. Using an elaborate system of code words and the anonymous browser Tor, she managed to digitally hide her pregnancy all the way up to the birth of her child. In an article about the experience, for Time , she pointed to a Financial Times report, which found that identifying a single pregnant woman is as valuable to data brokers as knowing the age, gender, and location of more than two hundred nonpregnant people, because of how much stuff new parents tend to buy. She also noted that simply attempting to evade market detection—by, for example, purchasing stacks of gift cards in order to buy a stroller—made her and her husband look as though they were trying to commit fraud.

I wasn’t going to do anything so strict or elaborate. I’d allow myself to text and send e-mails about my pregnancy, and to talk about it with my phone nearby. I assumed that, eventually, it would notice; I’d just wait and see when a diaper ad popped up on Instagram. I liked the idea of establishing a buffer zone between my psyche and the object that most closely monitors it. I found it almost shocking to remember that this was possible.

Pregnancy tends to erode both your freedom and your privacy. Past a certain point in your second trimester, strangers will begin reaching toward your stomach and telling you about the real difference between boys and girls. But I had eluded this during my first pregnancy, because COVID hit before I started showing. In the months that followed, I began to feel the difference between witnessing something and surveilling it, and to recognize that the most pleasurable moments in my life had occurred out of the reach of any oversight. I had felt then an almost psychedelic sense of autonomy; time was dilating, and the slow bloom inside me was beyond anyone’s reach. I wanted to see if I could feel anything like that again.

During pregnancy, and in the early days of parenthood, one is both the object and the conductor of intense surveillance. Last year, the artist and filmmaker Sophie Hamacher co-edited an anthology of writing on the subject, called “ Supervision ,” which was published by M.I.T. Press. “As I became absorbed with tracking and monitoring my child,” Hamacher writes in the preface, “I was increasingly aware that I was a subject of tracking and monitoring by others: advertisers, medical professionals, government entities, people on the street. I began to wonder about the relationship between the way I watched her and the ways we were being watched.” Surveillance encompasses both policing and caretaking, Hamacher notes. In practice, its polarized qualities—“beneficial and harmful, intimate and distanced”—intertwine. Baby monitors use technology developed for the military. Many contemporary models run on CCTV.

Most American households with young children use baby monitors or trackers; two recent surveys put market penetration at seventy-five and eighty-three per cent, respectively. (Both surveys were conducted by companies that make these devices.) And there are now countless other ways that technology will help you to observe and scrutinize your child: nanny-cam Teddy bears, G.P.S. stroller accessories, scales that track your baby’s weight over time, disks that can be affixed to diapers and which will notify you if your baby rolls onto his stomach while he’s asleep. Increasingly, such products use A.I. to detect signs of distress. “The need to know whether a child is safe and well is perfectly natural, which makes the nature of such surveillance appear innocent,” the writer and scholar Hannah Zeavin notes in “Family Scanning,” one of the essays in “Supervision.” But, she adds, “these technologies conceal the possibility of false positives, disrupted emergency services, and of collaboration with state forces—wittingly or unwittingly—all in the name of keeping children safe.” As a general rule, these devices don’t lead to better outcomes for the babies they monitor. More often—like social media, which promises connection as a salve for the loneliness created by social media—parenting tech exacerbates, even calls into existence, the parental anxieties that it pledges to soothe.

This has become a common pattern in contemporary life. Nearly a fifth of U.S. households are estimated to use doorbell cameras, many of them from Ring, the Amazon-owned company that has expanded its reach through police partnerships and a dedicated app that encourages users to post footage of strangers. Ring cameras haven’t made neighborhoods measurably safer, but they have made users measurably more paranoid, and placed more people, sometimes with grave outcomes, in contact with the police. Until recently, police could readily access surveillance footage from the Ring network without a warrant by posting requests on the app. It also gave its own employees and third-party contractors “ ‘ free range ’ access” to view and download videos from users’ homes.

In 2015, the company Owlet started selling a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar Smart Sock, which monitored babies’ heart rates and oxygen levels, and alerted parents if these figures were abnormal. Although the company insists that it has made clear that the product is not intended to “treat or diagnose” sudden infant death syndrome—and there is no evidence that it reduces the risk of SIDS occurring—such devices are sometimes referred to as “ SIDS monitors.” But, in 2017, an opinion piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association cautioned physicians against recommending the product. “There are no medical indications for monitoring healthy infants at home,” the authors wrote. The device, they noted, could “stimulate unnecessary fear, uncertainty, and self-doubt in parents about their abilities to keep their infants safe.” The following year, a study in the same journal found “concerning” inaccuracies in oxygen readings. When Owlet went public, in February, 2021, the company had a valuation of more than a billion dollars; later that year, the F.D.A. issued a warning letter that the Smart Sock wasn’t an authorized medical device, and the company pulled it off the market. A million units had already been sold. The following year, Owlet launched a new version, called the Dream Sock, which would receive F.D.A. approval. Most of the reviews for the Dream Sock exude profound gratitude. Parents write about the peace of mind that comes from knowing the baby is being constantly monitored, about not knowing what they would do if the device didn’t exist.

Surveillance capitalism, Zuboff writes, “aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty.” But little is certain when it comes to babies. The control that we feel when we’re engaged in surveillance almost always proves illusory, though the control, or at least the influence, that others exert on us through surveillance is real.

It is not a coincidence that Roe v. Wade, a ruling grounded in the right to privacy, was overturned at a time when privacy in the U.S was on its conceptual deathbed. There are other legal principles that might have served as a stronger foundation for abortion rights: the right to equal protection, or the right to bodily integrity. As Christyne Neff wrote, in 1991, the physical effects of an ordinary pregnancy and delivery resemble those of a severe beating—flesh lacerated, organs rearranged, half a quart of blood lost. Can the state, she asked, rightfully compel a person to undergo this?

Since Roe fell, two years ago, fourteen states have claimed that power in absolute terms, banning abortion almost completely. Two states have successfully passed abortion-vigilante laws, which confer the power of carceral supervision on the public. Indiana’s attorney general has argued that abortion records should be publicly available, like death records; Kansas recently passed a law that would require abortion providers to collect details about the personal lives of their patients and make that information available to the government. Birth control and sex itself may be up next for criminal surveillance: the Heritage Foundation , last year, insisted, on Twitter, that “conservatives have to lead the way in restoring sex to its true purpose, & ending recreational sex & senseless use of birth control pills.”

For many women in America, pregnancy was a conduit to state surveillance long before the end of Roe. Poor women, especially poor nonwhite women, are often drug-tested during pregnancy, and sometimes during labor and delivery, without their informed consent. Women who take drugs during pregnancy have been charged with child abuse or neglect, including in cases in which the drugs were legal; women who have miscarried after taking drugs have been charged with manslaughter, even homicide, even when no causal link was proved. Sometimes this happens because the woman in question had responded to billboards and service announcements promising to help pregnant people who are struggling with substance use. In multiple states, women have been taken into custody when the safety of the fetus was called into question. “To be pregnant and poor in the United States is to play a game of roulette with one’s privacy, presumed confidential relationship with medical providers, and basic constitutional and medical rights,” the law professor Michele Goodwin writes in “ Policing the Womb ,” from 2020.

Goodwin describes the case of a woman in Iowa named Christine Taylor, who, in 2010, as a twenty-two-year-old mother of two, was accused of attempted feticide after she fell down the stairs while pregnant. Part of the evidence cited by the police was that she reportedly told a nurse that she hadn’t wanted the baby. (Ultimately, prosecutors decided not to press charges.) The carceral surveillance of pregnancy entails the criminalization of ambivalence, the inspection of these innermost desires. But the deepest truths about motherhood seem to me to be rooted in conflicting, coexisting emotions: nightmare and rapture in the same moment during labor, the love and despair that box each other at night in the weeks that follow, the joy of cuddling my nine-month-old undergirded by the horror of knowing that other babies are starving and dying in rubble. Before I had my first child, I had badly wanted to get pregnant. I had planned for it, prepared for it, hoped for it. Still, when I saw the positive test result, I cried.

My modest experiment went surprisingly smoothly. Because I’d had my first child not long before, this time I didn’t need to buy anything, and I didn’t want to learn anything. I smooth-brained my way to three months, four months, five; no diaper ads. I called up a lawyer and data-privacy specialist named Dominique Shelton Leipzig to get her perspective. Globally, she told me, we generate 2.5 quintillion bytes—that’s eighteen zeroes—of data per day. “The short answer is, you probably haven’t hidden what you think you have,” she said. I told her about the rules I’d set for myself, that I didn’t have many apps and had bought nothing but prenatal vitamins, and that Instagram did not appear to have identified me as pregnant. She paused. “I’m amazed,” she told me. “If you didn’t see any ads, I think you might have succeeded.” I congratulated myself by instantly dropping the experiment and buying maternity pants; ads for baby carriers popped up on my Instagram within minutes.

I had felt little satisfaction hiding from the ad trackers—if anything, I’d only become more conscious of how much surveillance I was engaged in, as both subject and object, and how much more insidious the problem was becoming. We rarely have a clear understanding of what we’re doing when we engage in surveillance of ourselves or others. Life360, an app that’s used by more than sixty million people and is marketed as an easy way to track your child’s location via their smartphone, was found in 2021 to be selling raw location information to data brokers. (The company said it now sells only aggregate data.) In a Pew survey from 2023, seventy-seven per cent of Americans said they had very little to no trust in how social-media executives handle user data, and seventy-one per cent were concerned about how the government uses it. In another survey, ninety-three per cent of Americans said they wouldn’t buy a doorbell camera if it sold data about their family. People just want to be safer. I had wanted security, too, and affirmation—and I had wanted to be a writer. I had disclosed so much of my life to people I’ll never know.

My husband and I had not bought a baby monitor for our first child, a choice that satisfied his desire to not buy things and my desire to insist that certain aspects of experience are fundamentally ungovernable. But shortly after the second child was born she developed eczema, and started scratching her sweet, enormous cheeks in her sleep. One morning, my husband went to her and found that she’d clawed her face open, leaving blood smudged all over her sleep sack and smeared all over her face. “We need a video monitor!” I wailed, already Googling options. “We need to buy a video monitor today.”

We didn’t buy one, but for weeks I regretted it and second-guessed myself. And I surveilled the baby with technology in other ways all the time. In the early weeks, I relied on an app to tell me how much milk she’d drunk and how many soiled diapers she’d had that day—activities that I myself had witnessed just hours before. I felt like a Biblical angel with a thousand eyes, somehow unable to see anything. I took pictures because I knew I would have no memory of the precise contours of this exact baby in a month. When she didn’t seem hungry enough, I panicked, obsessing over every feed.

“What’s the line between pathological self-surveillance and care for a newborn? Is there one?” Sarah Blackwood, an English professor at Pace University, asks, in “Supervision.” Blackwood contrasts the “fantasy of efficiency and sterility” built into parenting tech with the “psychic state of watchfulness so many mothers find themselves in”—a state that is “metastatic, fecund, beyond.” One afternoon, my husband took the baby from me: she was sobbing, and I was incoherently frantic, trying to get her to eat. She was O.K., he told me; she’d eat when she needed to. But I know what’s good for her, and it’s my job to make her do it, I thought, furious. Around the fringes of my consciousness, I felt a flicker of understanding about how this idea that everything was controllable had become so ubiquitous, how we had confused coercion with care. ♦

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By Louisa Thomas

Joseph Epstein, conservative provocateur, tells his life story in full

In two new books, the longtime essayist and culture warrior shows off his wry observations about himself and the world

Humorous, common-sensical, temperamentally conservative, Joseph Epstein may be the best familiar — that is casual, personal — essayist of the last half-century. Not, as he might point out, that there’s a lot of competition. Though occasionally a scourge of modern society’s errancies, Epstein sees himself as essentially a serious reader and “a hedonist of the intellect.” His writing is playful and bookish, the reflections of a wry observer alternately amused and appalled by the world’s never-ending carnival.

Now 87, Epstein has just published his autobiography, “ Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life: Especially if You’ve Had a Lucky Life ,” in tandem with “ Familiarity Breeds Content: New and Selected Essays .” This pair of books brings the Epstein oeuvre up to around 30 volumes of sophisticated literary entertainment. While there are some short-story collections (“The Goldin Boys,” “Fabulous Small Jews”), all the other books focus on writers, observations on American life, and topics as various as ambition, envy, snobbery, friendship, charm and gossip. For the record, let me add that I own 14 volumes of Epstein’s views and reviews and would like to own them all.

Little wonder, then, that Epstein’s idea of a good time is an afternoon spent hunched over Herodotus’s “Histories,” Marguerite Yourcenar’s “Memoirs of Hadrian” or almost anything by Henry James, with an occasional break to enjoy the latest issue of one of the magazines he subscribes to. In his younger days, there were as many as 25, and most of them probably featured Epstein’s literary journalism at one time or another. In the case of Commentary, he has been contributing pieces for more than 60 years.

As Epstein tells it, no one would have predicted this sort of intellectual life for a kid from Chicago whose main interests while growing up were sports, hanging out, smoking Lucky Strikes and sex. A lackadaisical C student, Myron Joseph Epstein placed 169th in a high school graduating class of 213. Still, he did go on to college — the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — because that’s what was expected of a son from an upper-middle-class Jewish family. But Urbana-Champaign wasn’t a good fit for a jokester and slacker: As he points out, the president of his college fraternity “had all the playfulness of a member of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers.” No matter. Caught peddling stolen copies of an upcoming accounting exam for $5 a pop, Epstein was summarily expelled.

Fortunately, our lad had already applied for a transfer to the University of Chicago, to which he was admitted the next fall. Given his record, this shows a surprising laxity of standards by that distinguished institution, but for Epstein the move was life-changing. In short order, he underwent a spiritual conversion from good ol’ boy to European intellectual in the making. In the years to come, he would count the novelist Saul Bellow and the sociologist Edward Shils among his close friends, edit the American Scholar, and teach at Northwestern University. His students, he recalls, were “good at school, a skill without any necessary carry-over, like being good at pole-vaulting or playing the harmonica.”

Note the edge to that remark. While “Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life” is nostalgia-laden, there’s a hard nut at its center. Epstein feels utter contempt for our nation’s “radical change from a traditionally moral culture to a therapeutic one.” As he explains: “Our parents’ culture and that which came long before them was about the formation of character; the therapeutic culture was about achieving happiness. The former was about courage and honor, the latter about self-esteem and freedom from stress.” This view of America’s current ethos may come across as curmudgeonly and reductionist, but many readers — whatever their political and cultural leanings — would agree with it. Still, such comments have sometimes made their author the focus of nearly histrionic vilification.

Throughout his autobiography, this lifelong Chicagoan seems able to remember the full names of everyone he’s ever met, which suggests Epstein started keeping a journal at an early age. He forthrightly despises several older writers rather similar to himself, calling Clifton Fadiman, author of “The Lifetime Reading Plan,” pretentious, then quite cruelly comparing Mortimer J. Adler, general editor of the “Great Books of the Western World” series, with Sir William Haley, one of those deft, widely read English journalists who make all Americans feel provincial. To Epstein, “no two men were more unalike; Sir William, modest, suave, intellectually sophisticated; Mortimer vain, coarse, intellectually crude.” In effect, Fadiman and Adler are both presented as cultural snake-oil salesmen. Of course, both authors were popularizers and adept at marketing their work, but helping to enrich the intellectual lives of ordinary people doesn’t strike me as an ignoble purpose.

In his own work, Epstein regularly employs humor, bits of slang or wordplay, and brief anecdotes to keep his readers smiling. For instance, in a chapter about an editorial stint at the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Epstein relates this story about a colleague named Martin Self:

“During those days, when anti-Vietnam War protests were rife, a young woman in the office wearing a protester’s black armband, asked Martin if he were going to that afternoon’s protest march. ‘No, Naomi,’ he said, ‘afternoons such as this I generally spend at the graveside of George Santayana.’”

Learned wit, no doubt, but everything — syntax, diction, the choice of the philosopher Santayana for reverence — is just perfect.

But Epstein can be earthier, too. Another colleague “was a skirt-chaser extraordinaire," a man "you would not feel safe leaving alone with your great-grandmother.” And of himself, he declares: “I don’t for a moment wish to give the impression that I live unrelievedly on the highbrow level of culture. I live there with a great deal of relief.”

In his many essays, including the sampling in “Familiarity Breeds Content,” Epstein is also markedly “quotacious,” often citing passages from his wide reading to add authority to an argument or simply to share his pleasure in a well-turned observation. Oddly enough, such borrowed finery is largely absent from “Never Say You’ve Had a Happy Life.” One partial exception might be the unpronounceable adjective “immitigable,” which appears all too often. It means unable to be mitigated or softened, and Epstein almost certainly stole it from his friend Shils, who was fond of the word.

Despite his autobiography’s jaunty title, Epstein has seen his share of trouble. As a young man working for an anti-poverty program in Little Rock, he married a waitress after she became pregnant with his child. When they separated a decade later, he found himself with four sons to care for — two from her previous marriage, two from theirs. Burt, the youngest, lost an eye in an accident while a toddler, couldn’t keep a job, fathered a child out of wedlock and eventually died of an opioid overdose at 28. Initially hesitant, Epstein came to adore Burt’s daughter, Annabelle, as did his second wife, Barbara, whom he married when they were both just past 40.

Some pages of “Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life” will be familiar to inveterate readers of Epstein’s literary journalism, all of which carries a strong first-person vibe. Not surprisingly, however, the recycled anecdotage feels less sharp or witty the second time around. But overall, this look back over a long life is consistently entertaining, certainly more page-turner than page-stopper. To enjoy Epstein at his very best, though, you should seek out his earlier essay collections such as “The Middle of My Tether,” “Partial Payments” and “A Line Out for a Walk.” Whether he writes about napping or name-dropping or a neglected writer such as Somerset Maugham, his real subject is always, at heart, the wonder and strangeness of human nature.

Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life

Especially if You’ve Had a Lucky Life

By Joseph Epstein

Free Press. 304 pp. $29.99

Familiarity Breeds Content

New and Selected Essays

Simon & Schuster. 464 pp. $20.99

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Stormy Daniels Delivers Intense Testimony in Trump’s Trial: 6 Takeaways

A long day on the stand put Ms. Daniels’s credibility to the test as defense lawyers challenged her motives.

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By Kate Christobek and Jesse McKinley

• Published May 7, 2024 Updated May 10, 2024

Follow our live coverage of Trump’s hush money trial in Manhattan.

“The people call Stormy Daniels.”

So began the intense and often uncomfortable testimony of Ms. Daniels, who spent almost five hours in a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday recounting her story of a 2006 encounter with Donald J. Trump and the ensuing hush-money cover-up that has become the bedrock of the prosecution’s case.

Ms. Daniels spoke quickly and at length about her first meeting with Mr. Trump at a celebrity golf tournament near Lake Tahoe in Nevada.

After the lunch break, Mr. Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche moved for a mistrial, arguing that the prosecution’s questions had been designed to embarrass Mr. Trump and prejudice the jury.

The judge, Justice Juan M. Merchan of State Supreme Court, agreed that some of Ms. Daniels’s testimony might have “been better left unsaid,” but he denied a mistrial.

The former president is accused of falsifying business records to cover up a $130,000 payment to Ms. Daniels just before the 2016 election. Mr. Trump, 77, has denied the charges and says he did not have sex with Ms. Daniels. If convicted, he could face prison time or probation.

Here are six takeaways from Mr. Trump’s 13th day on trial.

Prosecutors took a risk with their witness.

Jurors heard a vivid account of the Lake Tahoe encounter and met the woman who had received the hush-money payment. This could have presented a risk for prosecutors, depending on whether the jury viewed Ms. Daniels’s story as prurient or powerful.

Ms. Daniels described meeting Mr. Trump at the golf event and accepting his dinner invitation after her publicist said, “What could possibly go wrong?”

She recalled that Mr. Trump had been wearing pajamas when she met him at his hotel suite and that she asked him to change. They discussed the porn industry, and he asked about residuals, unions and testing for sexually transmitted diseases, she said.

She said they had talked about his family, including his daughter, whom he likened to Ms. Daniels — “People underestimate her as well,” Ms. Daniels recalled him as saying. They also discussed his wife; Mr. Trump said they did not “even sleep in the same room.” He suggested that Ms. Daniels might appear on “The Apprentice.”

When she later emerged from the bathroom, Ms. Daniels found Mr. Trump partially undressed, she said. The sex was consensual, she said, but there was a power “imbalance.”

The Links Between Trump and 3 Hush-Money Deals

Here’s how key figures involved in making hush-money payoffs on behalf of Donald J. Trump are connected.

Trump received another warning.

Justice Merchan has already held the former president in contempt 10 times, fined him $10,000 and twice threatened to send him to jail. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump again drew the judge’s ire after Justice Merchan said he had been “cursing audibly” and “shaking his head.”

The judge asked Mr. Trump’s lawyers privately to talk to their client, saying Mr. Trump’s actions might intimidate the witness, Ms. Daniels.

“You need to speak to him,” the judge said. “I won’t tolerate that.”

The motive for the payoff is a point of contention.

Prosecutors asked Ms. Daniels about a 2018 statement in which she denied the sexual encounter. Ms. Daniels said she had not wanted to sign it and that it was not true.

Defense lawyers, capitalizing on what they seem to perceive as Ms. Daniels’s shortcomings as a witness, came out blazing. One of them, Susan Necheles, implied in her cross-examination that Ms. Daniels was trying to “extort money” from Mr. Trump.

Ms. Daniels replied sharply, “False.”

Daniels’s story bothers Trump.

Before court even started Tuesday morning, Trump telegraphed his frustration with Ms. Daniels in an angry post on Truth Social, saying he had just learned about a coming witness and that his lawyers had “no time” to prepare. The post was removed shortly thereafter, possibly because of concerns over violating the gag order.

Mr. Trump, who has spent much of the trial with his eyes closed, remained attentive for part of the day, often with a sour expression on his face. He continually whispered to his lawyers and at one point mouthed an expletive.

But by the afternoon, he had returned to his habit of closing his eyes, even during a combative cross-examination.

Daniels’s credibility is a hurdle for prosecutors.

Ms. Daniels’s motivations are a major focus of the defense. In a sharp moment, Ms. Necheles confronted her about what Ms. Necheles described as her hatred of the former president and asked whether she wanted him to go to jail. Ms. Daniels responded, “I want him to be held accountable.”

Ms. Necheles also asked Ms. Daniels about making money by claiming to have had sex with Mr. Trump. Ms. Daniels responded, “I have been making money by telling my story,” and later added, “It has also cost me a lot of money.”

Who Are Key Players in the Trump Manhattan Criminal Trial?

The first criminal trial of former President Donald J. Trump is underway. Take a closer look at central figures related to the case.

Trump’s words haunt him.

Prosecutors have tried several times to use Mr. Trump’s prior statements against him.

Before Ms. Daniels testified Tuesday, a witness read aloud passages from books by Mr. Trump. Some spoke to his frugality. Others spoke to his penchant for revenge.

“For many years I’ve said that if someone screws you, screw them back,” the witness read. The passage continued, “When somebody hurts you, just go after them as viciously and as violently as you can.”

Not long after, one of his enemies — Ms. Daniels — took the stand. Her cross-examination resumes on Thursday.

Kate Christobek is a reporter covering the civil and criminal cases against former president Donald J. Trump for The Times. More about Kate Christobek

Jesse McKinley is a Times reporter covering upstate New York, courts and politics. More about Jesse McKinley

Our Coverage of the Trump Hush-Money Trial

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Ahead of Michael Cohen’s testimony on Monday, Justice Juan M. Merchan told prosecutors to keep Mr. Cohen from speaking about the case .

Several witnesses have mentioned Keith Schiller , Donald Trump’s bodyguard, during their testimony. Where is he?

Custodial witnesses, who have discussed FedEx labels, Sharpies and stapling protocol, have made for little spectacle in the trial. But they’ve provided basic information  about the documents at the heart of the case.

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Key Inquiries: Trump faces several investigations  at both the state and the federal levels, into matters related to his business and political careers.

Case Tracker:  Keep track of the developments in the criminal cases  involving the former president.

What if Trump Is Convicted?: Could he go to prison ? And will any of the proceedings hinder Trump’s presidential campaign? Here is what we know , and what we don’t know .

Trump on Trial Newsletter: Sign up here  to get the latest news and analysis  on the cases in New York, Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C.