[galraen]

I'm not sure where the term 'Halloween' came from, but the origins are Celtic, and was known as Samhain, which was the festival marking the start of the new year.

From LivingMyths.com:

Quote:

Samhain The Celtic year began with Samhain. Celebrated around 31 October, it was a time of deliberate misrule and contrariness, rather like the Roman Saturnalia. It was also a time when the veil between this world and the Otherworld was thought to be so thin that the dead could return to warm themselves at the hearths of the living, and some of the living - especially poets - were able to enter the Otherworld through the doorways of the sidhe, such as that at the Hill of Tara in Ireland. At Samhain cattle were brought in for the winter, and in Ireland the warrior élite, the Fianna, gave up war until Beltain. It was a sacred time, whose peace was normally broken only by the ritualized battle of board games such as fidchell. Our modern Hallowe’en stems from Samhain, and one explanation of the traditional pumpkin lanterns is that the Celts once placed the skulls of ancestors outside their doors at this time. The Christians took over the Celtic festival and turned it into All Saints Day. Even the modern English celebration of Guy Fawkes Day has echoes of the ancient fire festival.

It's not unusual for Christians to hijack pagan festivals, mainly due to their failure to persuade people to abandon them. They couldn't stop people celebrating Yuletide, so simply overlayed it with Christmas. So what the person that Fable started this thread about is doing is continuing Christian tradition, although as Fljotsdale pointed out, in this instance he/she is re-inventing the wheel so to speak, as Christianity has already invented All Saints.