Текст на английском про Хэллоуин

Halloween is on the 31st of October. It is a popular holiday in Britain and the USA.

People make lanterns from pumpkins. They cut funny or scary faces on them. There is a candle inside.

Children wear costumes. They are witches, ghosts, vampires and cats. They go from house to house and say 'Trick or treat!'. People give them sweets.

The Halloween colours are orange and black.

At our school we have a Halloween party. I like dancing and playing games there. This year my costume is a black cat.

Last October our English teacher organised a Halloween party for our class. Before that, I knew only a little about this holiday, so I was very excited.

A week before the party we learnt about Halloween traditions. We read that the holiday is very old and comes from Ireland and Scotland. People there believed that ghosts visited the earth on the last night of October.

On the day of the party everybody came in costumes. Masha was a vampire, Kirill was a skeleton, and I was a witch with a long black hat. Our teacher's costume was the funniest: she was a pumpkin!

We played games, sang songs and carved a big pumpkin. It was harder than I thought, and my hands were orange afterwards. Then we ate cakes and sweets.

It was the best party of the year. Next October I am going to make my own costume.

Halloween is celebrated on 31 October, the evening before All Saints' Day. Its name comes from 'All Hallows' Eve', which means 'the evening before the holy day'. However, the roots of the holiday are much older than its name.

Many historians believe that Halloween goes back to Samhain, an ancient Celtic festival which marked the end of summer and the beginning of winter. People thought that on this night the border between the world of the living and the world of the dead became thin, so they lit bonfires and wore disguises to protect themselves from spirits.

The custom of carving lanterns also started in Ireland and Scotland, although people there used turnips, not pumpkins. When Irish and Scottish immigrants moved to America in the nineteenth century, they discovered that pumpkins were bigger and easier to carve.

Today Halloween is especially popular in the USA, where children go trick-or-treating and houses are decorated with spiders, skeletons and fake cobwebs. In Russia it is mainly celebrated at parties and in English classes.

I have been to several Halloween parties, and I have always enjoyed choosing a costume. If my friends agree, we will make a short horror film this year.

Every year at the end of October, millions of people deliberately set out to frighten themselves. They dress up as zombies, watch horror films and walk through haunted houses, screaming and laughing at the same time. At first glance this seems strange: why would anyone choose to feel fear, an emotion that evolved to protect us from danger?

Psychologists suggest that the answer lies in control. When we are frightened in a safe setting, our bodies react as if the danger were real: the heart beats faster and adrenaline floods the system. Yet our minds know that nothing bad will actually happen, and once the scare is over, we are left with a pleasant feeling of relief and even pride.

Halloween offers exactly this kind of controlled fear, wrapped in humour and community. Rooted in Celtic beliefs about spirits crossing into the world of the living, the holiday has gradually lost its original meaning and turned into a playful celebration of everything dark and mysterious.

Not everyone welcomes it, of course. Some people consider Halloween a foreign, overly commercial holiday with little connection to their own culture. I can see why they might feel this way, but I would argue that cultures have always borrowed from one another, and a holiday is only as meaningful as the people celebrating it make it.

For me, Halloween is less about fear than about imagination. Had my English teacher not organised a party when I was ten, I might never have discovered how much fun it is to become someone else for one evening.