Random Fact of the day!!
So today in church... I saw this woman with a Pea Coat... I sat there wondering where the name originated from, so I asked my oma...
she didn't know....
Opa?? NOPE! he knew not either
I even called Joey's dad!!
I stumped him HAHAHAHAH =D ok anyway
So here we go.
in 1723 The navy made pea coats out of pilot clothe, which is just a heavy cloth.therefore - P-Coat BUT! if you look further into it's origination
Pea comes from the obsolete english word "pee"
Which means Coat made of coarse cloth.
Pij is the modern dutch word found in Pij - Jakker which is very very simliar to our modern day *well... not so modern i guess if they originated in 1723* Pea coats!!
and that is our history lesson of the day =D and the world was a better place!!
with that I'm signing out to go Trick Or Treating.. which is a WHOLE nother spiffilicious story... hrm... may be I'll tell that one really quickly....
SOOO ok there are a bunch of stories... BTW i LJ-cut the stuff that you don't NEED to read.. but this was pretty spiffy \/ but anyway.. enjoy!
One obvious question about Halloween is, "What does the word itself mean?" The name is actually a shortened version of "All Hallows' Even," the eve of All Hallows' Day. "Hallow" is an Old English word for "holy person," and All Hallows' Day is simply another name for All Saints' Day, the day Catholics commemorate all the saints. At some point, people began referring to All Hallows' Even as "Hallowe'en" and then simply "Halloween."
Following the Jewish tradition, Christians observe many holy days from sundown on one day until sundown on the following day. This is where we get the practice of celebrating Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve, etc. The direct predecessor of modern-day Halloween is the festivity that began All Saints Day, which started at sundown on October 31.
While it takes its name from All Saints Day, modern Halloween is actually a combination of several different traditions. In fact, a lot of the things we do on Halloween predate Christianity entirely. In the following sections, we'll look at the chief traditions that feed into today's Halloween and see how they got all tangled up together in one holiday.
Most of the traditions of Halloween date back to Samhain (sow-en), the ancient Celtic New Year. Samhain, which translates to "end of summer," occurred around the end of October, when the weather started to get cold. At its heart, Samhain was an observance of all the important things that were happening during this change of seasons.
The Celtic people, who came together as a society around 800 B.C., kept sheep and cattle. When the weather got colder, the shepherds brought their animals down from the hills to closer pastures. This shift changed daily life significantly. In the winter months, everybody stayed inside or close to home, working on handcrafts and spending time together. Samhain also marked the final harvest of the year, an event commemorated by festivals in many cultures.
Celtic tradition held that turning points, times when things change from one state to another, had magical properties. Samhain marked the biggest turning point of the year -- a change in the weather as well as a shift in everybody's lives. The Celts believed this magical time opened up a sort of connection to the dead. Those souls that had passed through the ultimate turning point, the shift from life to death. They believed the world of the living was closest to the world of the dead at the time of Samhain, and that the spirits of the dead traveled again among the living. A lot of the activities of the Samhain festival were connected to this belief, and many of those practices evolved into modern day Halloween traditions.
The Celts recorded their history orally -- they did not write anything down, but passed on beliefs and stories from person to person. For this reason, historians often disagree about the Celts' practices and beliefs. So nobody is really sure what the Samhain festival was like, but there are a number of accounts that provide interesting explanations of modern day Halloween practices
Christians have been honoring their virtuous dead from the earliest days of the religion. In traditional Roman Catholicism, exceedingly virtuous men and women may be canonized as saints in the afterlife. Since they are endowed with holiness, saints are close to God, and may perform miracles on earth. Roman Catholics, and some other Christians, honor saints, and ask them for guidance in daily life. (See How does someone become a saint? to learn more about sainthood.)
Catholics commemorate many saints on their own "saints day," often the anniversary of their death. But with thousands of canonized saints, only a small percentage are recognized regularly. In the seventh century, Pope Boniface IV officially established All Saints' Day in order to honor all the saints at one time. History records such a sacred day before Boniface's time, but it wasn't widely observed.
Originally, Christians observed All Saints' Day on May 13. But in the eighth century, Pope Gregory III moved it to November 1. Officially, the Church chose this new date to mark the papal dedication of a church honoring the saints. But many historians believe the Church really moved the observance to correspond with Samhain and other pagan fall festivals.
The Catholic Church had a long-standing policy of incorporating non-Christian traditions into its holidays in order to bring people into the Catholic faith. This included moving the dates of Christian holidays to those of established non-Christian occasions. Many historians believe, for example, that the church set Christmas on December 25 so that it would correspond with pagan winter solstice festivals.
In any case, when All Saints' Day moved to November 1, the church did begin to incorporate Samhain traditions into the holy day's activities. This helped bring descendents of the ancient Celts into Christianity, but it posed some problems for the church. Much of the Samhain traditions centered on the supernatural and spirit world, ideas that don't have much of a place in Christianity. Recognizing saints, who were by definition deceased, covered a lot of the same ground, but the converts were still fascinated by the idea of their familiar dead returning to the world of the living.
Despite some unease in the church, many supernatural ideas persisted in All Saints' Day Eve celebrations, making the occasion a remarkable combination of Christian and pagan beliefs. At the end of the 10th century, the church tried to give these traditions a little more direction by establishing All Souls' Day, an occasion to recognize all Christian dead.
All Souls' Day, observed on November 2, is celebrated with masses and festivities in honor of the dead. The living pray on behalf of Christians who are in purgatory, the state in the afterlife where souls are purified before proceeding to heaven. Souls in purgatory, who are members of the church just like living Christians, must suffer so that they can be purged of their sins. Through prayer and good works, living members of the church may help their departed friends and family.
After its introduction, this holiday did sate many Catholics' interest in death and the supernatural. But the unchristian idea of wandering spirits persisted in some areas, as did the festivity atmosphere of Samhain. Conceding that they could not completely get rid of the supernatural elements of the celebrations, the Catholic church began characterizing the spirits as evil forces associated with the devil. This is where we get a lot of the more disturbing Halloween imagery, such as evil witches and demons.
All Souls' Day lives on today, particularly in Mexico, where All Hallows' Eve, All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day are collectively observed as "Los Dias de los Muertos" (The Days of the Dead). First and foremost, the Days of the Dead is a time when families fondly remember the deceased. But it is also a time marked by festivities, including spectacular parades of skeletons and ghouls. In one notable tradition, revelers lead a mock funeral procession with a live person inside a coffin.
This masquerade is closely connected to the celebration of Halloween, as are other elements of All Souls' Day.
In medieval times, one popular All Souls' Day practice was to make "soul cakes," simple bread desserts with a currant topping. In a custom called "souling," children would go door-to-door begging for the cakes, much like modern trick-or-treaters. For every cake a child collected, he or she would have to say a prayer for the dead relatives of the person who gave the cake. These prayers would help the relatives find their way out of purgatory and into heaven. The children even sang a soul cake song along the lines of the modern "Trick-or-treat, trick-or-treat, give me something good to eat." One version of the song went:
A soul cake!
A soul cake!
Have mercy on all Christian souls, for
A soul cake!
There is also some evidence of trick-or-treat type activities in the original Celtic tradition. Historians say the Celts would dress up in ghoulish outfits and parade out of town to lead the wandering spirits away. Additionally, Celtic children would walk door to door to collect firewood for a giant communal bonfire. Once the bonfire was burning, the revelers would extinguish all the other fires in the village. They would then relight every fire with a flame taken from the Samhain bonfire, as a symbol of the people's connection to one another.
A lot of the Samhain celebration had to do with honoring Celtic gods, and there's evidence that the Celts would dress as these deities as part of the festival. They may have actually gone door to door to collect food to offer to the gods. It is fairly clear that Samhain involved an offering of food to spirits. There may have been animal sacrifices, and some historians say the Celts even sacrificed people, but the evidence is not conclusive.
The Celts believed in fairies and other mischievous creatures, and the notion of Halloween trickery may have come from their reported activities on Samhain. There's also good reason to suppose that the Celtic New Year's Eve was something like our own New Year's Eve -- a time when people let go of their inhibitions, drank heavily and got into trouble. The trickery tradition may simply come from this spirit of revelry
As part of the Samhain celebration, Celts would bring home an ember from the communal bonfire at the end of the night. They carried these embers in hollowed-out turnips, creating a lantern resembling the modern day jack-o'-lantern.
But the direct predecessor of jack-o'-lanterns dates from 18th century Ireland, where ancient Celtic traditions remained a significant part of the national culture. A very popular character in Irish folk tales was Stingy Jack, a disreputable miser who, on several occasions, avoided damnation by tricking the devil (often on All Hallows' Eve). In one story, he convinced Satan to climb up a tree for some apples, and then cut crosses all around the trunk so the devil couldn't climb down. The devil promised to leave Jack alone forever, if he would only let him out of the tree.
When Jack eventually died, he was turned away from Heaven, due to his life of sin. But, in keeping with their agreement, the Devil wouldn't take Jack either. He was cursed to travel forever as a spirit in limbo. As Jack left the gates of Hell, the Devil threw him a hot ember to light the way in the dark. Jack placed the ember in a hollowed-out turnip, and wandered off into the world. According to the Irish legend, you might see Jack's spirit on All Hallows' Eve, still carrying his turnip lantern through the darkness.
Traditional jack-o'-lanterns, hollowed-out turnips with embers or candles inside, became a very popular Halloween decoration in Ireland and Scotland a few hundred years ago. Folk tradition held that they would ward off Stingy Jack and other spirits on Halloween, and they also served as representations of the souls of the dead. Irish families who emigrated to America brought the tradition with them, but they replaced the turnips with the more plentiful pumpkins. As it turns out, pumpkins were easier to carve than turnips. People began to cut frightening faces and other elaborate designs into their jack-o'-lanterns.
There are more beliefs.. like for example.. there is a story that the celts would carve the pumpkins and put them in front of their houses so that the ghosts would think that the house had already been possessed. And they would walk around with the jack o laterns lit up and on their shoudlers making it seem like there was a ghost who had already taken over the man.. therefore they were free to roam the streets and not get possessed or attack by a spirit....
This then led to the whole "dressing up" idea... where people would then dress up as skeletons..a nd spirits of the sorts so they could roam around
The kids would play tricks on people and scare them..... until people would offer them candy so they would pass their house.... the kids realized what they had started, therefore "trick or treating"
If they got a treat.. they wouldn't scare them... otherwise, beware!!!!
This was kind of interesting for me at least. Hope y'all enjoy. Sorry it's a lot to read but it's history of beliefs and tradition! and tonight is halloween. Beware, day of the dead begins at midnight tonight. tomorrow and tuesday. beware!!!!!!!! *insert evil laugh here*
she didn't know....
Opa?? NOPE! he knew not either
I even called Joey's dad!!
I stumped him HAHAHAHAH =D ok anyway
So here we go.
in 1723 The navy made pea coats out of pilot clothe, which is just a heavy cloth.therefore - P-Coat BUT! if you look further into it's origination
Pea comes from the obsolete english word "pee"
Which means Coat made of coarse cloth.
Pij is the modern dutch word found in Pij - Jakker which is very very simliar to our modern day *well... not so modern i guess if they originated in 1723* Pea coats!!
and that is our history lesson of the day =D and the world was a better place!!
with that I'm signing out to go Trick Or Treating.. which is a WHOLE nother spiffilicious story... hrm... may be I'll tell that one really quickly....
SOOO ok there are a bunch of stories... BTW i LJ-cut the stuff that you don't NEED to read.. but this was pretty spiffy \/ but anyway.. enjoy!
One obvious question about Halloween is, "What does the word itself mean?" The name is actually a shortened version of "All Hallows' Even," the eve of All Hallows' Day. "Hallow" is an Old English word for "holy person," and All Hallows' Day is simply another name for All Saints' Day, the day Catholics commemorate all the saints. At some point, people began referring to All Hallows' Even as "Hallowe'en" and then simply "Halloween."
Following the Jewish tradition, Christians observe many holy days from sundown on one day until sundown on the following day. This is where we get the practice of celebrating Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve, etc. The direct predecessor of modern-day Halloween is the festivity that began All Saints Day, which started at sundown on October 31.
While it takes its name from All Saints Day, modern Halloween is actually a combination of several different traditions. In fact, a lot of the things we do on Halloween predate Christianity entirely. In the following sections, we'll look at the chief traditions that feed into today's Halloween and see how they got all tangled up together in one holiday.
Most of the traditions of Halloween date back to Samhain (sow-en), the ancient Celtic New Year. Samhain, which translates to "end of summer," occurred around the end of October, when the weather started to get cold. At its heart, Samhain was an observance of all the important things that were happening during this change of seasons.
The Celtic people, who came together as a society around 800 B.C., kept sheep and cattle. When the weather got colder, the shepherds brought their animals down from the hills to closer pastures. This shift changed daily life significantly. In the winter months, everybody stayed inside or close to home, working on handcrafts and spending time together. Samhain also marked the final harvest of the year, an event commemorated by festivals in many cultures.
Celtic tradition held that turning points, times when things change from one state to another, had magical properties. Samhain marked the biggest turning point of the year -- a change in the weather as well as a shift in everybody's lives. The Celts believed this magical time opened up a sort of connection to the dead. Those souls that had passed through the ultimate turning point, the shift from life to death. They believed the world of the living was closest to the world of the dead at the time of Samhain, and that the spirits of the dead traveled again among the living. A lot of the activities of the Samhain festival were connected to this belief, and many of those practices evolved into modern day Halloween traditions.
The Celts recorded their history orally -- they did not write anything down, but passed on beliefs and stories from person to person. For this reason, historians often disagree about the Celts' practices and beliefs. So nobody is really sure what the Samhain festival was like, but there are a number of accounts that provide interesting explanations of modern day Halloween practices
Christians have been honoring their virtuous dead from the earliest days of the religion. In traditional Roman Catholicism, exceedingly virtuous men and women may be canonized as saints in the afterlife. Since they are endowed with holiness, saints are close to God, and may perform miracles on earth. Roman Catholics, and some other Christians, honor saints, and ask them for guidance in daily life. (See How does someone become a saint? to learn more about sainthood.)
Catholics commemorate many saints on their own "saints day," often the anniversary of their death. But with thousands of canonized saints, only a small percentage are recognized regularly. In the seventh century, Pope Boniface IV officially established All Saints' Day in order to honor all the saints at one time. History records such a sacred day before Boniface's time, but it wasn't widely observed.
Originally, Christians observed All Saints' Day on May 13. But in the eighth century, Pope Gregory III moved it to November 1. Officially, the Church chose this new date to mark the papal dedication of a church honoring the saints. But many historians believe the Church really moved the observance to correspond with Samhain and other pagan fall festivals.
The Catholic Church had a long-standing policy of incorporating non-Christian traditions into its holidays in order to bring people into the Catholic faith. This included moving the dates of Christian holidays to those of established non-Christian occasions. Many historians believe, for example, that the church set Christmas on December 25 so that it would correspond with pagan winter solstice festivals.
In any case, when All Saints' Day moved to November 1, the church did begin to incorporate Samhain traditions into the holy day's activities. This helped bring descendents of the ancient Celts into Christianity, but it posed some problems for the church. Much of the Samhain traditions centered on the supernatural and spirit world, ideas that don't have much of a place in Christianity. Recognizing saints, who were by definition deceased, covered a lot of the same ground, but the converts were still fascinated by the idea of their familiar dead returning to the world of the living.
Despite some unease in the church, many supernatural ideas persisted in All Saints' Day Eve celebrations, making the occasion a remarkable combination of Christian and pagan beliefs. At the end of the 10th century, the church tried to give these traditions a little more direction by establishing All Souls' Day, an occasion to recognize all Christian dead.
All Souls' Day, observed on November 2, is celebrated with masses and festivities in honor of the dead. The living pray on behalf of Christians who are in purgatory, the state in the afterlife where souls are purified before proceeding to heaven. Souls in purgatory, who are members of the church just like living Christians, must suffer so that they can be purged of their sins. Through prayer and good works, living members of the church may help their departed friends and family.
After its introduction, this holiday did sate many Catholics' interest in death and the supernatural. But the unchristian idea of wandering spirits persisted in some areas, as did the festivity atmosphere of Samhain. Conceding that they could not completely get rid of the supernatural elements of the celebrations, the Catholic church began characterizing the spirits as evil forces associated with the devil. This is where we get a lot of the more disturbing Halloween imagery, such as evil witches and demons.
All Souls' Day lives on today, particularly in Mexico, where All Hallows' Eve, All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day are collectively observed as "Los Dias de los Muertos" (The Days of the Dead). First and foremost, the Days of the Dead is a time when families fondly remember the deceased. But it is also a time marked by festivities, including spectacular parades of skeletons and ghouls. In one notable tradition, revelers lead a mock funeral procession with a live person inside a coffin.
This masquerade is closely connected to the celebration of Halloween, as are other elements of All Souls' Day.
In medieval times, one popular All Souls' Day practice was to make "soul cakes," simple bread desserts with a currant topping. In a custom called "souling," children would go door-to-door begging for the cakes, much like modern trick-or-treaters. For every cake a child collected, he or she would have to say a prayer for the dead relatives of the person who gave the cake. These prayers would help the relatives find their way out of purgatory and into heaven. The children even sang a soul cake song along the lines of the modern "Trick-or-treat, trick-or-treat, give me something good to eat." One version of the song went:
A soul cake!
A soul cake!
Have mercy on all Christian souls, for
A soul cake!
There is also some evidence of trick-or-treat type activities in the original Celtic tradition. Historians say the Celts would dress up in ghoulish outfits and parade out of town to lead the wandering spirits away. Additionally, Celtic children would walk door to door to collect firewood for a giant communal bonfire. Once the bonfire was burning, the revelers would extinguish all the other fires in the village. They would then relight every fire with a flame taken from the Samhain bonfire, as a symbol of the people's connection to one another.
A lot of the Samhain celebration had to do with honoring Celtic gods, and there's evidence that the Celts would dress as these deities as part of the festival. They may have actually gone door to door to collect food to offer to the gods. It is fairly clear that Samhain involved an offering of food to spirits. There may have been animal sacrifices, and some historians say the Celts even sacrificed people, but the evidence is not conclusive.
The Celts believed in fairies and other mischievous creatures, and the notion of Halloween trickery may have come from their reported activities on Samhain. There's also good reason to suppose that the Celtic New Year's Eve was something like our own New Year's Eve -- a time when people let go of their inhibitions, drank heavily and got into trouble. The trickery tradition may simply come from this spirit of revelry
As part of the Samhain celebration, Celts would bring home an ember from the communal bonfire at the end of the night. They carried these embers in hollowed-out turnips, creating a lantern resembling the modern day jack-o'-lantern.
But the direct predecessor of jack-o'-lanterns dates from 18th century Ireland, where ancient Celtic traditions remained a significant part of the national culture. A very popular character in Irish folk tales was Stingy Jack, a disreputable miser who, on several occasions, avoided damnation by tricking the devil (often on All Hallows' Eve). In one story, he convinced Satan to climb up a tree for some apples, and then cut crosses all around the trunk so the devil couldn't climb down. The devil promised to leave Jack alone forever, if he would only let him out of the tree.
When Jack eventually died, he was turned away from Heaven, due to his life of sin. But, in keeping with their agreement, the Devil wouldn't take Jack either. He was cursed to travel forever as a spirit in limbo. As Jack left the gates of Hell, the Devil threw him a hot ember to light the way in the dark. Jack placed the ember in a hollowed-out turnip, and wandered off into the world. According to the Irish legend, you might see Jack's spirit on All Hallows' Eve, still carrying his turnip lantern through the darkness.
Traditional jack-o'-lanterns, hollowed-out turnips with embers or candles inside, became a very popular Halloween decoration in Ireland and Scotland a few hundred years ago. Folk tradition held that they would ward off Stingy Jack and other spirits on Halloween, and they also served as representations of the souls of the dead. Irish families who emigrated to America brought the tradition with them, but they replaced the turnips with the more plentiful pumpkins. As it turns out, pumpkins were easier to carve than turnips. People began to cut frightening faces and other elaborate designs into their jack-o'-lanterns.
There are more beliefs.. like for example.. there is a story that the celts would carve the pumpkins and put them in front of their houses so that the ghosts would think that the house had already been possessed. And they would walk around with the jack o laterns lit up and on their shoudlers making it seem like there was a ghost who had already taken over the man.. therefore they were free to roam the streets and not get possessed or attack by a spirit....
This then led to the whole "dressing up" idea... where people would then dress up as skeletons..a nd spirits of the sorts so they could roam around
The kids would play tricks on people and scare them..... until people would offer them candy so they would pass their house.... the kids realized what they had started, therefore "trick or treating"
If they got a treat.. they wouldn't scare them... otherwise, beware!!!!
This was kind of interesting for me at least. Hope y'all enjoy. Sorry it's a lot to read but it's history of beliefs and tradition! and tonight is halloween. Beware, day of the dead begins at midnight tonight. tomorrow and tuesday. beware!!!!!!!! *insert evil laugh here*