Halloween 2025: Day of the Dead and No Black Cats

This year, the Catalan town of Terrassa has made headlines after banning the adoption of black cats during the Halloween period. Local shelters say that in previous years, too many people adopted them as props for parties or photos, only to abandon them once the festivities were over. The ban will stay in place until early November to make sure any adoption is genuine. It is perhaps a small story, but it says a lot about how Spain is getting used to the influx of Halloween celebrations and how these contrast with its traditional autumnal customs.

Halloween itself dates back roughly 2,000 years to the Celtic festival of Samhain, which marked the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter. People believed that around this time the barrier between the living and the dead was at its thinnest, allowing spirits to move freely between worlds. In order to facilitate Christian missionary objectives in the early medieval period, the Church incorporated these traditions into its calendar when Christianity spread through the British Isles. The process began around the 7th and 8th centuries, when missionaries encountered these Celtic beliefs and sought to reframe them within a Christian context.

All Saints’ Day, or Día de Todos los Santos, had originally been celebrated in May. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III moved it to 1 November to coincide with Samhain and make conversion of the Celtic people easier. The night before became All Hallows’ Eve, which later evolved into Halloween. Two centuries later, All Souls’ Day (Día de los Fieles Difuntos), was added on 2 November to honour all the faithful departed. Together they formed a Christian framework built upon much older seasonal rituals of remembrance.

Spain, already Catholic by the time these festivals were added to the Christian calendar, adopted the same traditions. For centuries, families marked 1 and 2 November by visiting cemeteries, lighting candles and sharing autumn food such as panellets (traditional Catalan sweets), boniatos (sweet potatoes) and castañas asadas (roasted chestnuts). In Catalonia, these customs became part of La Castanyada, an older harvest celebration that still survives today, rooted in the same seasonal rhythm of remembering and gathering.

When the Spanish colonised the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries, they found that many Mesoamerican cultures already had elaborate ceremonies to honour the dead. In modern-day Mexico, among the Aztecs, for instance, this took place in July or August during the festival of Mictecacihuatl, the goddess of the underworld. During the colonisation period, missionaries did not suppress these beliefs, but rather moved them to early November to coincide with the European calendar of All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days. This fusion produced what we now recognise as Día de los Muertos. The ofrendas (altars) filled with cempasúchil (marigolds), calaveras de azúcar (sugar skulls), candles and food still reflect both worlds: Catholic devotion layered over indigenous tradition.

In Spain, Halloween itself has only begun to spread widely in the past two decades. What started as an imported American party has become a much larger event. Schools now hold costume parades, bars run themed nights, and supermarkets stock pumpkins and fake cobwebs alongside boniatos and castañas. For many, it is light-hearted fun, but it also reveals how easily American consumer culture exports itself across the globe. Halloween’s growth has coincided with the decline of quieter, more reflective traditions, showing just how thoroughly global marketing and cultural imperialism can reshape a nation’s calendar.