Your Halloween history lesson

Earlier this week children and adults in Rosemount and across the country celebrated Halloween, a popular holiday that in its modern incarnation is largely associated with excess.
For children, Halloween is an excuse to dress in costumes that are typically either adorable or horrifying and go door to door extort massive amounts of candy from friends and neighbors.
For adults, Halloween parties are frequently an excuse to consume excessive amounts of food and alcohol, and to dress in excessively revealing outfits. In this way, Halloween has followed an evolution similar to many other popular holidays in the United States, from New Year's Eve to the Fourth of July to Arbor Day.
But to focus on the modern trappings of Halloween is to ignore the holiday's proud history. Halloween at its beginning looked little like the holiday we celebrate today. Originally called All Hollow Eaves, Halloween began in 1783 as a way for roofers of the day to show off their work. Essentially an early ancestor of our modern Parade of Homes, construction companies would use the promise of sweet treats such as sugar cubes and caramel apples to lure children and their parents to view what were then remarkable advances in roofing technology. In fact, had the advent of modern gutter technology not coincided that year with a bountiful sugar beet crop the last day of October might look very different today.
There were no costumes at the first Halloween. It is widely believed the first instance of dressing up for the holiday occurred the following year, when Jack O'Lantern, then one of the most prominent roofers in of the day, decided he could draw more people to his homes if he gave prizes for the best dressed visitors to his homes. Among the most popular costumes that first year were John Wesley, who had gained fame in February of that year when he chartered the Methodist church, and Carl Friedrich Gauss, a pioneer in the field of summation.
Also common in those early years, though frowned upon by many, were costumes we see still today such as the slutty nurse and the cat woman.
O'Lantern's Halloween inventions did not stop with the costume, of course. As you may have guessed he is also widely believed to be the first to carve a face in a pumpkin, which grew in abundance that year, and place a candle in it as a kind of torch so people could admire his handiwork well into the night. He called this innovation the punk-o-torch. The name was changed later, but surprising to honor not the creator of the punk-o-torch but an entirely different Jack O'Lantern whose direct connection to the carved pumpkin remains shrouded in mystery but there are those who believe he was the first to perfect the now common "pointy-teeth" carving method.
Halloween has continued to evolve over the years. Bobbing for apples, though now a popular and lighthearted event common at Halloween parties, has a surprisingly tragic origin as a commemoration of the Great Apple Drownin' of 1832.
The name of the holiday was officially changed during the Great Depression as a way to save on printing costs, and the association with with roofing gradually faded away, replaced with overtones of the occult as people decided witches and ghosts made way cooler costumes than roofers.

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