Tag: Hallowe’en

Hallowe’en, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

November 1st, is All Saints’ Day, a long-standing holiday in the Catholic tradition that emerged from the ancient pagan holiday Samhain (pronounced Saw-wain) in the Celtic tradition.  It was a  time to bring the herds back for slaughter or wintering, and to prepare for the coming winter. It was also the time when the veil between this world and the spirit world was thinnest, and ghosts walked the earth.  Finally, this holiday weekend is a time to remember those who came before. on All Saints Day and All Souls’ Day (The Mexican Day of the Dead.

The holiday runs from sundown Friday to sundown Sunday.  In observing the holiday from dusk to dusk to dusk, we are following the customs of our Jewish and Celtic forebears, who not only began their  holidays at dusk rather than dawn but also celebrated their respective new year’s days in the late fall, going into and through the darkness to await the return of the light

On All Souls’ Day we will also observe that most annoying of customs, arbitrarily redefining daylight hours t by setting the clocks back an hour. disrupting our biorythms for the four darkest months.

So celebrate! Dress up. Decorate. Carve a pumpkin. Hand out treats. Visit a cemetery.  Remember a loved one, or more than one. Share a memory.  Plan your funeral. Feed the hungry. Remember that every end is also a beginning, and the light and the new year lie ahead..

Here is a poem for this holiday

The darkness begins

The faces of carved pumpkins

Glow from lighted candles within.

Children ring doorbells, costumed, in search of treats.

Or so it once was,

This holiday is now sanitized for safety

Fear of the coming darkness is banished

Replaced by noisy crowds with sugar highs

And costumes not of ghosts and devils

But TV characters and superheroes.

Without the fear and mystery of darkness

Without the silence to let us hear

The sounds of nature once again.

How can we reclaim our rightful role

As partners, not as overlords

Of the turning earth?

First Harvest, Celtic Style

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

Got some Irish, Scottish, Welsh in your ancestry? Or maybe some of the original Brits (Celtic) in your English ancestry, or Gallic that came to he islands with the Norman conquest? Celttc culture once covered a huge part of the European continent only to be run off to Britain those annoying Romans. Some of these holidays were baptized and melded into Christianity, especially . Easter with Ostara (the spring equinox, with bonfires at dawn), as well as Sammain/Hallowe’en (All Saints’ Day), Yul and Christmas(and midnight mass).. Others live on in other customs, like Groundhog Day (Imbolc) and the fertility festival of Beltain (May Day, the maypole as a mating ritual).. Lithia, the summer solstice was celebrated with midday bonfires, a midsummer holiday that is most closely kin to July 4th in this country.

But one lonesome little Celtic holiday seems to have disappeared from memory. This sweet little holiday on the first day of August is Lammas or Lughnasad, the celebration of first Harvest. I sit at the table with my friends eating fresh corn and tomatoes from the farmers’ market just two days before the holiday. As the Druids disappeared and the Celts turned to Christianity, Lammas was celebrated by bringing the first fruits of the harvest to church for a blessing, a custom carried on in this country into colonial times. I myself have led a blessing of the vegetables service, which is must less disaster-prone than a blessing of the animals and also provided fresh vegetables to our local food bank.

So add an upbeat holiday to your calendar the first of August and celebrate the abundance of harvest and the rich taste of fresh fruits and vegetables!