It’s Samhain!
Halloween or All Hallows Eve, Hallowmas!
Careful if you go out out ‘guising’ you geezers!
It's worth looking up really as it is so very interesting to see how the church in particular misconstrued (or wilfully misinterpreted and subsumed) natural events at this time of the year.
Today is one of the 'quarter' days signifying the end of Summer and Autumn and heralding Winter or the dying back of plants and the natural cycle of the seasons. People would slaughter their goat or cow to salt down for the winter for communities to have enough to eat. Light fires to stay warmer and as thoughts turned to death, mourn & remember those lost to us.
'Guising' (dressing up) was mean to be fun too and would be celebrated by giving particularly inventive costumes nuts and berries and cakes made from seasonal fruits [good luck with that if someone knocks on your door tonight. Don't think Haribo do nuts and berries let alone cake!]People baked 'soul cakes', which they would set outside their house for the poor. They also lit bonfires and set out lanterns carved out of turnips to keep the ghosts of the dead away.
Have at it I say! Dance around a fire, sky clad and sing a song, bang a drum and be happy! For soon enough you will be asked to choose a new leader of the tribe . . . . . .
. . . . .
This fascinating read from Writer's Almanac:
Today is All Hallows' Eve, or Halloween. It's believed to originate in the Celtic festival of Samhain, a pre-Christian festival held around November 1 to mark the end of summer and the beginning of winter. It was the biggest holiday of the Celtic year: a combination of harvest festival, New Year's Eve, and community meeting. Animals were brought in from the pasture and made secure for the coming winter, and some of them were slaughtered to provide salted meat for the winter. It was also a time of year when the veil between living and dead was particularly porous, so the spirits of the dearly departed were more easily able to return to their earthly homes. And it meant that other otherworldly creatures - like fairies, leprechauns, and other tricksters - were more likely to be among us. But even though ghosties and ghoulies wandered among the living during Samhain, the supernatural wasn't the main focus of the holiday the way it is for Halloween.
As the Christian Church grew, Samhain blended with a Christian holiday known as All Saints' Day, All Hallows' Day, or Hallowmas, which was originally observed in May but later moved to November 1. It was a time for believers to honor and remember those who had passed on to heaven. This blending was not coincidental. Early Christian leaders told their missionaries that if they wanted to convert pagans to Christianity, they shouldn't waste time on trying to suppress their rituals and practices, but rather they should consecrate those practices to Christ and incorporate them wherever possible. This had the effect of establishing Christianity among the pagans - but it also preserved many of the pagan practices instead of quashing them. So Samhain and All Saints' Day rituals influenced each other and eventually merged, and that is when we begin to see the traditions that we associate with Halloween today.
One such tradition was the practice of "souling," common in Britain and Ireland in the Middle Ages. Poor people would go door to door on Hallowmas and offer to pray for the souls of the family's dead relatives, in exchange for an offering of food. It mingled with the practice of "mumming": dressing up in costumes and performing wacky antics in exchange for food and drink, and eventually trick-or-treating became a traditional part of Halloween.
