Eric Hobsbawm: Reinventing Traditions

In our society many of the traditions that we have grown up with aren't as old as they claim to be and have a more recent origin than we may think. In the article “Inventing Traditions” by Eric Hobsbawm, he brings up the fact that our traditions that we celebrate today aren't what they use to be and are actually invented traditions. Hobsbawm defines an invented tradition “as a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past”(page 1). You could say that many of the holidays that we celebrate today are just invented traditions, as long as we can remember we have always done the same thing for the holidays but todays holidays are very different than what they

New traditions are invented because the old traditions adapt to the changing times around them. Halloween is a great example of an american tradition that has been reinvented many times throughout the years into a more modern form to accommodate with the changing times. Halloween as we know it today is a day that people get to dress up and go trick-or-treating but many people don’t know the real origin behind the date of October 31. Halloween’s origins dates all the way back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain. The Celts lived around 2,000 years ago in the area that is now known as Ireland. The Celts celebrated their new year on November 1 because it marked the end of summer and the harvest and was the beginning of the dark winter. It was also a time that they associated with death, they believed that on the night before the new year the boundary between the worlds of living and dead became blurred and the dead would return to earth. So on October 31, they would burn crops and animals as sacrifices and would wear costumes of animal skins in their celebration to help protect