Old SymbolsWhere every symbol began

Holidays and festivals

The symbols of seasonal holidays, and the history and stories behind them.

Holidays and festivals gathers the symbols of the calendar’s feasts, a section for each holiday, and follows every symbol back to the earliest record the sources give. There are two sections so far, both for the autumn.

Halloween symbols are the jack-o’-lanterns, soul cakes, black cats and bonfires of 31 October. Where Halloween came from is disputed. Jack Santino, in a lecture at the Library of Congress in 1982, traced it to “an ancient, pre-Christian Celtic festival of the dead”; the historian Lisa Bitel answers that “Samhain is Irish. Halloween isn’t.” Día de Muertos, “a related but different holiday” in the Library of Congress’s words, is a tradition of its own, and these pages don’t fold it into Halloween.

Thanksgiving symbols are the turkey, the cornucopia, the pumpkin pie and the rest of the American table on the fourth Thursday of November. The one eyewitness account of the 1621 harvest at Plymouth names only fowl and five deer. Since 1970, Native Americans have gathered in Plymouth on Thanksgiving Day for a National Day of Mourning.

Stories written down later

Much of what people repeat about both holidays was first written down long after the events it describes. Alexander Young’s footnote of 1841 named the 1621 harvest “the first Thanksgiving”. The idea that Samhain began the Celtic year, Stephen Winick of the Library of Congress writes, “only arose in the late nineteenth century”.

Where the two holidays meet

They meet in the pumpkin. Carved turnip lanterns were an Irish Halloween custom, and the National Museum of Ireland calls the pumpkin jack-o’-lantern an American development of it. In 1844 the New England poet John Greenleaf Whittier remembered carving “wild, ugly faces” in pumpkins as a boy, in a poem in praise of Thanksgiving pumpkin pie.

Sources

  1. Halloween: The Fantasy and Folklore of All Hallows (Jack Santino, 1982; updated 2009), Jack Santino, lecture at the Library of Congress, 29 October 1982, published by the American Folklife Center; web version as archived January 2016, Library of Congress, American Folklife Center (Internet Archive copy), opening paragraph
  2. The ancient Irish get far too much credit for Halloween (Lisa Bitel, 2024), Lisa Bitel, Dean's Professor of Religion and Professor of History, University of Southern California; The Conversation, 29 October 2024, The Conversation, opening paragraphs
  3. Halloween & Día de Muertos Resources (Stephen Winick, Library of Congress research guide), Stephen D. Winick, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress research guide, introduction (updated 2024), Library of Congress, Introduction
  4. Eye-Witness Account of the 1621 Harvest Celebration, You Are the Historian, Unit 4: 1621 Harvest Celebration (transcription of Edward Winslow’s letter, Mourt’s Relation, 1622), Plimoth Patuxet Museums, introduction; footnote
  5. What did they eat at the 1621 harvest celebration?, You Are the Historian, Unit 4: 1621 Harvest Celebration, Plimoth Patuxet Museums, introduction
  6. National Day of Mourning Monument (1998), You Are the Historian, Unit 5: Giving Thanks, Plimoth Patuxet Museums, plaque text
  7. Welcome to Folklife Today, and…Happy Halloween! (Stephen Winick, 2013), Stephen Winick, Folklife Today blog, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, 30 October 2013, Library of Congress, post text
  8. Ghost turnip, F1943.350 (National Museum of Ireland, Irish Folklife Collection), National Museum of Ireland, Irish Folklife Collection, object F1943.350, collection page, National Museum of Ireland, object F1943.350, description
  9. The Pumpkin (John Greenleaf Whittier, 1844), John Greenleaf Whittier, "The Pumpkin" (1844), in The Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, vol. II, Poems of Nature, Internet Archive (Project Gutenberg text), The Pumpkin, stanzas 3–4

Last reviewed September 30, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research