The day is often associated with the colors black and orange, and is strongly associated with symbols like the jack-o'-lantern. Halloween activities include trick-or-treating, wearing costumes and attending costume parties, ghost tours, bonfires, visiting haunted attractions, pranks, telling scary stories, and watching horror films.
History
Halloween has origins in the ancient festival known as Samhain (pronounced sow-in or sau-an),[4][5] which is derived from Old Irish and means roughly "summer's end".[5] This was a Gaelic festival celebrated mainly in Ireland andScotland. However, similar festivals were held by other Celts – for example the festival of Calan Gaeaf (pronounced kalan-geyf) which was held by the ancient Britons.
The festival of Samhain celebrates the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darker half", and is sometimes[6] regarded as the "Celtic New Year".
The celebration has some elements of a festival of the dead. The ancient Celts believed that the border between this world and the Otherworld became thin on Samhain, allowing spirits (both harmless and harmful) to pass through. The family's ancestors were honoured and invited home whilst harmful spirits were warded off. It is believed that the need to ward off harmful spirits led to the wearing of costumes and masks. Their purpose was to disguise oneself as a harmful spirit and thus avoid harm. In Scotland the spirits were impersonated by young men dressed in white with masked, veiled or blackened faces.
Samhain was also a time to take stock of food supplies and slaughter livestock for winter stores. Bonfires played a large part in the festivities. All other fires were doused and each home lit their hearth from the bonfire. The bones of slaughtered livestock were cast into its flames.
Sometimes two bonfires would be built side-by-side, and people and their livestock would walk between them as a cleansing ritual.
Costume sales
BIGresearch conducted a survey for the National Retail Federation in the United States and found that 53.3% of consumers planned to buy a costume for Halloween 2005, spending $38.11 on average (up $10 from the year before). They were also expected to spend $4.96 billion in 2006, up significantly from just $3.3 billion the previous year.
The style differences are subtle. The Olympus lens is accented in metallic silver, the Nikon lens is mostly black. The pop-up flash on the SP-590 gives the camera a little bit more height than the P90 as well as a more rounded look.
More differences appear on the back panel. The Olympus has a few more buttons clustered around the four-way controller, but they both adhere to the same basic control layout. The plastic molding around the Olympus's LCD is more angular, the Nikon is a little more rounded.
Olympus SP-590 UZ
