Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life

Rating:
Summary: A fantastic book on fall and harvest folk customs. Wow!!
Review: This book remains one of my all-time favorite books on folk holidays. A series of essays on various fall and harvest celebrations, it centers around Halloween, but branches out to discuss celebrations from Christmas mummers parades of the Ulster Scots and cutting the last sheaf of wheat, to Bonfire night in Newfoundland, to modern day trick-or-treat scare myths.

Beyond merely recounting the history of Halloween, this book does a wonderful job of placing our holiday in a global context and discussing what societal need these holidays or myths fulfilled. A fascinating study of our human history, I recommend this book highly to anyone interested in folk history and the "meaning" of holidays.

In a similar vein, I also recommend, Halloween : An American Holiday, an American History by Lesley Pratt Bannatyne for a more detailed look of the holiday as it unfolded in the US.