Name: What is Halloween?! (And how do people celebrate it?)
Uploaded: 2024-10-30T09:12:07.000Z
Duration: 5 min 2 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Today, we're learning about how and why people celebrate Halloween in the United States.

Relative clauses (Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive)

Halloween has a very long and interesting history, which likely began with an ancient Celtic celebration that took place at the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter.

And if I understand this correctly, people believed that during this time, spirits or ghosts could travel very easily between the world of the dead and the world of the living.

So, people would light big fires and wear scary costumes to keep the ghosts away.

Later on, this day would also become a Christian holiday called All Hallows' Eve.

However, most people who celebrate Halloween in the United States don't know very much about the holiday's history and don't think of it as a religious holiday.

We just think of it as a fun day on which we wear costumes and get free candy.

So, that's what we are going to talk about in this short video.

The main things that we do on Halloween in the United States.

The main thing that children do on Halloween is go trick-or-treating.

Basically, they put on costumes and they walk door-to-door collecting free candy.

In Scotland and Ireland a very long time ago, people would walk door-to-door doing small performances in exchange for food.

And it seems that this might be how trick-or-treating began.

At each house, the children knock on the door and when someone opens the door, the children say trick-or-treat.

Originally, this probably meant give us something nice or we will do something bad to you.

But nowadays, we don't really think about what this means or why we say it.

We just know that this is the thing that we say on Halloween when we want candy.

When we hear the word Halloween, we usually think about ghosts, witches, and monsters.

However, not everyone dresses up as something scary.

You'll definitely see ghosts, witches, and monsters, but you'll also see princesses, cowboys, astronauts, and cartoon characters.

Because Halloween is not a public holiday, if October 31st is on a weekday, children go to school as normal.

However, they will probably have some special Halloween activities at their school.

Families who celebrate Halloween will also usually buy pumpkins, carve faces into them, put candles inside of them, and decorate their porches with them.

In fact, this holiday is actually very popular with adults.

And adults like to do things like watch scary movies and go to costume parties.

Costume parties are just regular parties, but the guests all wear costumes.

And if you go to a Halloween party, you'll probably also see Halloween-themed food and drinks.

For example, there might be punch that looks like a witch's potion, cocktails with eyeballs in them, or cookies that look like human fingers.

And because pumpkins, apples, corn, and many other things are harvested around this time, another thing that many people like to do is visit farms and orchards.

Orchards are basically just farms where they grow trees to produce fruit.

So many people go to orchards to pick fresh apples or pumpkin patches to pick pumpkins.

Around Halloween, farms and orchards also often have special Halloween activities such as corn mazes, haunted houses, and haunted hay rides.

A haunted house is basically a house that you walk through that is full of ghosts, monsters, and other scary surprises.

Haunted hay rides are very similar to haunted houses, but instead of walking through a house, you ride through a field on a tractor.

So yeah, I hope this video has answered some of your questions about Halloween.

And if you're interested in learning more vocabulary for talking about fall, Halloween, Thanksgiving, etc., I recommend checking out this playlist right here.