Did you mean to sound like advertising copy?

What're you selling?

Aye one of the main reasons why "Italian" spoken among Italian-Americans over here in the US sounds so "funny" is because it's mostly a mix of the Napulitano, Sicilianu, and Calabrese languages – all of which are closer related to each other than to Standard Italian. And that's because most of our immigrant communities came from the south.

Which is very well known, its vector of transmission is understood, and if you have pet birds, there is a vaccine against it that most pigeon fanciers inoculate their flocks with to begin with.

This is nothing special.

It's paramyxovirus. The vector is well known.

It's not a mystery. The article says it's paramyxovirus. Newcastles.

This is well-known to pigeon fanciers, and many flocks are vaccinated against it.

Doesn't help too much with ferals, though. It will chew through them occasionally, and the next generation is stronger against it.

>But we have been discussing how the Christian celebrations of halloween are a lot younger than Christianity itself,

Halloween wasn't a foundational observance of Christianity, so in that sense it's "younger." But we do have strong records of its origins, where it fell on the calendar, what basic liturgical observances there were, and how these customs evolved over time, step by step. The Celts really didn't have a say in it.

>and we don’t really know how old Samhain is, right? We only have a record of it from the 9th century but that’s because we don’t have really have a written record of Gaelic Ireland before then.

It's the perfect thing to project upon – which is what happened in the 19th century: The era of romanticized history that gave us the tall tales about pagans and figures like Christopher Columbus. And we can see how accurate those were (i.e. not).

And we know through a large number of anthropological studies the idea that "it was always this way" is always flawed without an historical record to compare it to. Customs change over time, and many of the customs that we associate with Samhain today were not even mentioned until well after the genuine pagan Celts had all died out. There is only so far one can honestly extrapolate back.

Yes. Samhain customs that people point to are far too young to have genuinely influenced the Christian celebration. There is little evidence that the "ancient" observances that were "always that way" are actually ancient. Primary historical documents do not support it.

The very first recorded instances of anything like the modern secular Halloween celebrations ("guising"/costumes, etc.) is in the late 1700s early 1800s. The first solid example in the west is a newspaper article from Canada in the 1910s.

>Additionally, I am no expert on early Christian traditions but was halloween part of early Christian traditions? Or did it come later?

Halloween is the vigil of All Saints Day – and with how old Christian holidays were celebrated the vigil was the first part of the feast.

Precisely. There's a lot of "well it was always this way" with folk who want to link Samhain to Halloween –– but it wasn't. The trappings of observances that folk are insisting are "ancient" simply aren't, and do not pre-date Christian celebrations and customs.

Britanica repeats a number of woozles about Halloween that – despite having a citation pedigree – do not have primary historical sources to support them.

A lot of these are dubious, and absolutely not ancient (unless ~200 years old is "ancient" somehow). Halloween is not derived from Samhain (unless the ancient Celts were somehow influencing Rome in the early 600s, which is when and where Halloween got its start) and guising is no older than the late 1700s.