6 Minute English / Are Halloween costumes too scary?

Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript.

Hello. This is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning English. I m Sam.

And I m Neil. Whoo-oo-oo! Trick or treat!

For listeners at home, Neil is dressed up as a ghost. He s wearing a white bedsheet over his head with two holes cut out for his eyes, which must mean

It s Halloween! The start of autumn, when the days get shorter and leaves fall from the trees, marks Halloween, a festival which is celebrated all over the world at this time of year. In Britain, people carve scary faces into pumpkins and children go trick-or-treating, dressing up in fancy dress costumes and visiting people s homes shouting, trick or treat! for sweets and candy.

Halloween comes from an ancient festival called Samhain which celebrated the changing of the seasons, a time when it was believed the dead could make contact with the living, which is why children dress up as ghosts, witches and other scary monsters.

But recently, online shops have removed several Halloween costumes including creepy clown masks and real-life serial killer costumes after parents complained they were too frightening. In this programme, we ll be discussing whether Halloween is no longer harmless fun, and as usual, we ll be learning some new vocabulary as well.

But before that, and since you re all dressed up as a ghost, Neil, my question is this why did people traditionally dress up in costumes on Halloween? Was it:

a) to scare their neighbours as a jokeb) to use up their old clothesc) to hide from ghosts

I think it was to hide from ghosts.