Halloween in the capital

Some Christians observe this custom at Halloween today. Lesley Bannatyne believes this could have been a Christianization of an earlier pagan custom. Many Christians in mainland Europe, especially in France, believed “that once a year, on Hallowe’en, the dead of the churchyards rose for one wild, hideous carnival” known as the danse macabre, which was often depicted in church decoration. Christopher Allmand and Rosamond McKitterick write in The New Cambridge Medieval History that the danse macabre urged Christians “not to forget the end of all earthly things”. The danse macabre was sometimes enacted in European village pageants and court masques, with people “dressing up as corpses from various strata of society”, and this may be the origin of Halloween costume parties.