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Columbus & Central Ohio, United States
DeLena Ciamacco is a well-known, respected Top Producing Realtor in Central Ohio. Her myriad of accomplishments, recognition, and professional credentials as they relate to Real Estate, make her a perfect individual to provide insight to the masses on all aspects of Real Estate sales. Her creativity and honest approach to marketing Real Estate has enabled her to succeed in her career. DeLena’s philosophy is “An educated and well prepared Buyer or Seller is a smart Buyer or Seller”. Her desire is to inform the public, by pulling from her 20+ years of Real Estate sales & Marketing, what is necessary to get to a successful closing in these challenging times.

Friday, October 30, 2020

The History of Halloween - Presented by DeLena Ciamacco & The Ciamacco Team

 

THE HISTORY OF HALLOWEEN

Source: History.com Editors URL Link: https://www.history.com/topics/halloween/history-of-halloween Updated: October 28, 2020

Halloween is a holiday celebrated each year on October 31, and Halloween 2020 will occur on Saturday, October 31. The tradition originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off ghosts. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III designated November 1 as a time to honor all saints. Soon, All Saints Day incorporated some of the traditions of Samhain. The evening before was known as All Hallows Eve, and later Halloween. Over time, Halloween evolved into a day of activities like trick-or-treating, carving jack-o-lanterns, festive gatherings, donning costumes and eating treats.

ANCIENT ORIGINS OF HALLOWEEN



Halloween’s origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago, mostly in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1.

This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the New Year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31 they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth.

In addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort during the long, dark winter.

To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities. During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other’s fortunes.

When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.

 

Did you know? One quarter of all the candy sold annually in the U.S. is purchased for Halloween.

By 43 A.D., the Roman Empire had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the 400 years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain.



The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple, and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of bobbing for apples that is practiced today on Halloween.

 

All Saints' Day

On May 13, 609 A.D., Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome in honor of all Christian martyrs, and the Catholic feast of All Martyrs Day was established in the Western church. Pope Gregory III later expanded the festival to include all saints as well as all martyrs, and moved the observance from May 13 to November 1.

By the 9th century, the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands, where it gradually blended with and supplanted older Celtic rites. In 1000 A.D., the church made November 2 All Souls’ Day, a day to honor the dead. It’s widely believed today that the church was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, church-sanctioned holiday.



All Souls’ Day was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels and devils. The All Saints’ Day celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints’ Day) and the night before it, the traditional night of Samhain in the Celtic religion, began to be called All-Hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween.

 

Halloween Comes to America

The celebration of Halloween was extremely limited in colonial New England because of the rigid Protestant belief systems there. Halloween was much more common in Maryland and the southern colonies.

As the beliefs and customs of different European ethnic groups and the American Indians meshed, a distinctly American version of Halloween began to emerge. The first celebrations included “play parties,” which were public events held to celebrate the harvest. Neighbors would share stories of the dead, tell each other’s fortunes, dance and sing.

Did you know? More people, especially millennials, are buying costumes for their pets. Twenty percent did so in 2018, up from 16 percent in 2017.

Colonial Halloween festivities also featured the telling of ghost stories and mischief-making of all kinds. By the middle of the 19th century, annual autumn festivities were common, but Halloween was not yet celebrated everywhere in the country.

In the second half of the 19th century, America was flooded with new immigrants. These new immigrants, especially the millions of Irish fleeing the Irish Potato Famine, helped to popularize the celebration of Halloween nationally.

History of Trick-or-Treating

Borrowing from European traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to house asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became today’s “trick-or-treat” tradition. Young women believed that on Halloween they could divine the name or appearance of their future husband by doing tricks with yarn, apple parings or mirrors.



In the late 1800s, there was a move in America to mold Halloween into a holiday more about community and neighborly get-togethers than about ghosts, pranks and witchcraft. At the turn of the century, Halloween parties for both children and adults became the most common way to celebrate the day. Parties focused on games, foods of the season and festive costumes.

Parents were encouraged by newspapers and community leaders to take anything “frightening” or “grotesque” out of Halloween celebrations. Because of these efforts, Halloween lost most of its superstitious and religious overtones by the beginning of the twentieth century.

Halloween Parties

By the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween had become a secular but community-centered holiday, with parades and town-wide Halloween parties as the featured entertainment. Despite the best efforts of many schools and communities, vandalism began to plague some celebrations in many communities during this time.

By the 1950s, town leaders had successfully limited vandalism and Halloween had evolved into a holiday directed mainly at the young. Due to the high numbers of young children during the fifties baby boom, parties moved from town civic centers into the classroom or home, where they could be more easily accommodated

Between 1920 and 1950, the centuries-old practice of trick-or-treating was also revived. Trick-or-treating was a relatively inexpensive way for an entire community to share the Halloween celebration. In theory, families could also prevent tricks being played on them by providing the neighborhood children with small treats.

Thus, a new American tradition was born, and it has continued to grow. Today, Americans spend an estimated $6 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country’s second largest commercial holiday after Christmas.

Halloween Movies

Speaking of commercial success, scary Halloween movies have a long history of being box office hits. Classic Halloween movies include the “Halloween” franchise, based on the 1978 original film directed by John Carpenter and starring Donald Pleasance, Nick Castle, Jamie Lee Curtis and Tony Moran. In “Halloween,” a young boy named Michael Myers murders his 17-year-old sister and is committed to jail, only to escape as a teen on Halloween night and seek out his old home, and a new target.  


Considered a classic horror film down to its spooky soundtrack, it inspired 11 other films in the franchise and other “slasher films” like “Scream,” “Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Friday the 13.” A direct sequel to the original "Halloween" was released in 2018, starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Nick Castle. More family-friendly Halloween movies include “Hocus Pocus,” “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” “Beetlejuice” and “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.” 

All Souls Day and Soul Cakes

The American Halloween tradition of trick-or-treating probably dates back to the early All Souls’ Day parades in England. During the festivities, poor citizens would beg for food and families would give them pastries called “soul cakes” in return for their promise to pray for the family’s dead relatives.

The distribution of soul cakes was encouraged by the church as a way to replace the ancient practice of leaving food and wine for roaming spirits. The practice, which was referred to as “going a-souling,” was eventually taken up by children who would visit the houses in their neighborhood and be given ale, food and money.

The tradition of dressing in costume for Halloween has both European and Celtic roots. Hundreds of years ago, winter was an uncertain and frightening time. Food supplies often ran low and, for the many people afraid of the dark, the short days of winter were full of constant worry.

On Halloween, when it was believed that ghosts came back to the earthly world, people thought that they would encounter ghosts if they left their homes. To avoid being recognized by these ghosts, people would wear masks when they left their homes after dark so that the ghosts would mistake them for fellow spirits.

On Halloween, to keep ghosts away from their houses, people would place bowls of food outside their homes to appease the ghosts and prevent them from attempting to enter.

Black Cats and Ghosts 

Halloween has always been a holiday filled with mystery, magic and superstition. It began as a Celtic end-of-summer festival during which people felt especially close to deceased relatives and friends. For these friendly spirits, they set places at the dinner table, left treats on doorsteps and along the side of the road and lit candles to help loved ones find their way back to the spirit world.

Today’s Halloween ghosts are often depicted as more fearsome and malevolent, and our customs and superstitions are scarier too. We avoid crossing paths with black cats, afraid that they might bring us bad luck. This idea has its roots in the Middle Ages, when many people believed that witches avoided detection by turning themselves into black cats.

We try not to walk under ladders for the same reason. This superstition may have come from the ancient Egyptians, who believed that triangles were sacred (it also may have something to do with the fact that walking under a leaning ladder tends to be fairly unsafe). And around Halloween, especially, we try to avoid breaking mirrors, stepping on cracks in the road or spilling salt.

Halloween Matchmaking and Lesser-Known Rituals

But what about the Halloween traditions and beliefs that today’s trick-or-treaters have forgotten all about? Many of these obsolete rituals focused on the future instead of the past and the living instead of the deadIn particular, many had to do with helping young women identify their future husbands and reassuring them that they would someday—with luck, by next Halloween—be married. In 18th-century Ireland, a matchmaking cook might bury a ring in her mashed potatoes on Halloween night, hoping to bring true love to the diner who found it.

In Scotland, fortune-tellers recommended that an eligible young woman name a hazelnut for each of her suitors and then toss the nuts into the fireplace. The nut that burned to ashes rather than popping or exploding, the story went, represented the girl’s future husband. (In some versions of this legend, the opposite was true: The nut that burned away symbolized a love that would not last.)

Another tale had it that if a young woman ate a sugary concoction made out of walnuts, hazelnuts and nutmeg before bed on Halloween night she would dream about her future husband.

Young women tossed apple-peels over their shoulders, hoping that the peels would fall on the floor in the shape of their future husbands’ initials; tried to learn about their futures by peering at egg yolks floating in a bowl of water and stood in front of mirrors in darkened rooms, holding candles and looking over their shoulders for their husbands’ faces.

Other rituals were more competitive. At some Halloween parties, the first guest to find a burr on a chestnut-hunt would be the first to marry. At others, the first successful apple-bobber would be the first down the aisle.

Of course, whether we’re asking for romantic advice or trying to avoid seven years of bad luck, each one of these Halloween superstitions relies on the goodwill of the very same “spirits” whose presence the early Celts felt so keenly.

Friday, August 21, 2020

Looking For A New Home?

Give Yourself a Leg Up When Looking for a New Home


Looking for a home can sometimes be tough. In a seller’s market, it may be quite difficult to find a home that meets your needs within your price range. However, you shouldn’t give up. Here are some strategies and tools that can give you an edge over the competition.

Improve Your Credit Score

Being able to obtain the house you want requires getting approved for a mortgage you can afford. To do that, you are going to need a healthy credit score. Obtain your credit score and then take steps to improve it by changing your spending behavior and bill paying habits.


Make Sure You Have Significant Savings

While the mortgage will be used to space out payments for your home over a period of decades, you will also be required to make a down payment. This down payment can be as high as 20% of the value of the home you purchase. Large down payments may be required for more expensive homes. Begin saving immediately.


Get Preapproved for a Mortgage

Obtaining a preapproval for a mortgage can help ensure that you are able to close on a deal for a house much more quickly than would otherwise. It can also allow you to know what homes are within your price range and which are not.


Deal Directly with Home Builders

You may want to form a relationship with a home builder to either build a home to your specifications or help you find one that has already been constructed that meets your needs.


Limit Your Requests

In a competitive market, home sellers can pick and choose who gets the home. In this kind of situation, it may be advantageous to limit your requests for maintenance to be performed on the home or buy a home before your current home is sold.


Try to Be Flexible

If you have to deal with a lot of competition from other homebuyers, you should try to be more flexible than if it were a buyer’s market. This will help appease the seller and make sure you are chosen over other buyers that are pickier. For example, you could try to be flexible in regards to the timeline the seller prefers. While it may take longer to finish the process, letting the seller choose things like the closing date can produce a lot of good will.


Do Your Research

Buying a home is not something you should leap into head first. Before you even begin looking for homes to buy, you need to do a lot of research. This includes educating yourself on the homebuying process. It also includes research to determine the fair price for a home in the area you want to move to. Educating yourself first can help you avoid any significant mistakes.




Tuesday, August 18, 2020

Negotiating Repairs After A Home Inspection!



Negotiating Repairs After A Home Inspection
 
The home inspector’s job is to give you a report of any issues that are identified in the home—both big and small. From there, your realtor will work with you to determine what’s reasonable to negotiate over and how to go about the process.

To start, you and your realtor are going to want to choose what fixes are most important to you. You can certainly request minor fixes for things like cracked tiles or broken outlets, but be sure to hone in on what your biggest concerns are before handing over any requests to the seller.

Once you have narrowed down your list of requests, your realtor will present them to the seller’s agent. Here are various types of requests you might make in response to a home inspection report:


1. Asking The Seller To Fix An Issue Before Closing

It’s usually quite easy to accommodate, at least insofar as the smaller repairs. Keep in mind however that sellers might not be motivated to pay for top quality repairs, so you may be better off going the next route. 


2. Asking For Price Compensation

A buyer may be better off requesting a reduction in the home’s sale price to accommodate for the cost of repairs. This is another common way to go, though sellers and buyers often have different ideas about what a fair price reduction is for repairs. Do your research. 

3. Asking For Alternate Compensation

You may choose to barter as a way to negotiate repairs after a home inspection. If you do, make sure to ask for items that represent real value to you, since you’re essentially taking them in lieu of cash. 


4. Asking For A Home Warranty...
...to cover your first year of residency, especially if the home has outdated appliances that aren’t quite on the fritz but may be soon. Home warranties include plumbing/electrical/heating/cooling systems. However, they don’t cover things like garages, non-plumbing related roof problems, and septic systems. 



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