Halloween is for the dead. So why candy?

The full narration of the video.

Halloween is a night for the dead, yet kids go door to door asking for candy. On the night of October 31st, American kids knock and shout: trick or treat! At China's Ghost Festival, people set out food for ancestors. Halloween flips it: people dressed as ghosts come asking for food.

This candy is like a relay baton. Let's carry it back, one leg at a time. Start with today. This year Americans are expected to spend 4.1 billion dollars on Halloween candy alone. And most of it comes factory-wrapped.

From the 1970s, parents stopped trusting homemade treats and only accepted sealed ones. Before that, World War Two ended and sugar was no longer rationed. Candy makers made small wrapped sweets just for Halloween. Go further back, and kids weren't asking for candy yet.

A hundred years ago, Halloween night was rowdy. Young people pulled off gates and played prank after prank. So grown-ups kept apples, nuts and coins ready. A little for every kid at the door bought a quiet night. Dressing up and knocking on doors came over with Scottish and Irish immigrants.

Back home, children put on masks and sang at a neighbor's door for a bite to eat. Go back a few hundred years more, to medieval England, and what people asked for was a cake. November 2nd was for remembering the dead. The poor went door to door for a small round cake, called a soul cake.

Take a cake, and you prayed for that family's dead. One cake, one prayer. The first leg goes back over two thousand years. The ancient Celts held Samhain at the end of October to mark the harvest. They believed that on this night, the door between the living and the dead opened a crack.

Scholars think people left food outside to calm the spirits. They also wore disguises so the spirits wouldn't know them. Later the church made November 1st All Saints' Day. The night before was All Hallows' Eve, which is where the word Halloween comes from. Now let's run the baton forward.

Food for the dead became a cake for the people who prayed. The cake became apples for singing children, then coins for a quiet night, and finally a wrapped piece of candy. A baton is the same stick at the finish. This food changed at every leg. Only the knock on the door stayed the same.

So candy on Halloween isn't off-topic. Scholars pieced together parts of the chain, but the direction is clear: candy is that food for the dead, handed down to today. Here in China, Ghost Festival offerings look a bit like that plate left outside two thousand years ago. One thing no one can answer: who first shouted "trick or treat".

If a little ghost knocks on your door tonight, do you hand over candy, or let them play a trick?