A call to restore community, creativity, and cultural soul (to replace soulless consumerism, plastic junk, wanton selfish hedonism, and fake artifice).   

If you've not checked out our extensive Hallowen History👈 section, we encourage you to do so in order to learn how Hallowfolk's A Folk Halloween Experience can revive creativity and community in America in the 21st Century by helping you to:  

• Reconnect with the meaning behind popular Halloween activities

• Explore traditions of a bygone era

• Celebrate authentic Halloween the way it was meant to be celebrated

Despite centuries of erasure and commercialization, some rituals remain. Trick-or-treating blends souling and 'guising. Pumpkin carving echoes the ancient jack-o’-lantern guiding spirits home. Costumes, though store-bought, still carry the memory of ritual disguise, imagination, and community creation. And most important: the light on the porch, the welcome to strangers, the memory of gathering. These fragments are what remain of an ancient whole.

We lost the sacred meaning of the holiday. Halloween once honored the dead, marked the shift into winter, and served as protection against spirits and misfortune. Today, the handmade has become packaged, and ancestral memory has been replaced by animatronic skeletons. Intergenerational traditions—storytelling, home-crafted costumes, communal fire rituals—are fading. We no longer remember why we knock on doors or light up the night.

Halloween can be more than spooky decor. It can be a ritual of healing and belonging. A night of permission—for children to transform, for neighbors to connect, for stories to pass between generations. We can reclaim creativity through handmade costumes, hand-carved pumpkins, and honoring our own dead. We can teach children that ghosts are not just scary—they are memory, and they made us who we are.  We can appreciate our departed loved ones and their sacrifices for us to be here in order to sidestep our fake consumer culture.

We invite you—whether you’re a parent, teacher, elder, artist, student, or seeker—to help rebuild Halloween as it once was: a celebration of connection, the freedom to imagine and be who you are or imagine yourself to be, and the engine of both creativity and community in every American community. 

Through community parades, porch rituals, costume-making nights, fire circles, and storytelling, we can restore the soul of Halloween. Let this night be a refuge for all: the forgotten, the outcast, the grieving, the joyful. A night where everyone belongs. 

Halloween is the one night we remember what it means to be human together. Let’s make it real again.