New York, Oct 13 (THAINDIAN NEWS) Halloween is an annual holiday and it is celebrated on October 31.

It has roots in the Celtic festival of Samhain and the Christian holy day of All Saints’ Day. It is generally a secular celebration, but it may have some perceived religious overtones as well.

The day is associated with the colors orange and black, and is strongly associated with symbols like the jack-o’-lantern and pumpkin carving. Halloween’s exciting activities include trick-or-treating, wearing costumes and attending costume parties, ghost tours, bonfires, visiting haunted attractions, pranks, reading scary stories, and watching horror films.

The custom of wearing elaborate scary costumes and masks at Halloween goes back to Celtic traditions of attempting to copy the evil spirits or placating them, In Scotland for instance where the dead were impersonated by young men with masked, veiled or blackened faces, dressed in white.

Halloween costumes are a class apart from costumes for other celebrations as they are often designed to imitate supernatural and scary beings, vampires, ghosts, skeletons, witches, and devils, or in more recent years such science fiction-inspired characters as aliens and superheroes. The costumes may also be of pop culture figures like presidents, athletes, celebrities, or film, television, and cartoon characters in recent times.

Halloween masks and costumes are available in numerous shops and even on the Internet because of the popular craze of this ‘fun-filled’ and different festival.