There will be a wailing and a gnashing of teeth across the land as Halloween approaches.
But when Halloween was Samhein, the angst went beyond the hassles of disguising your kids and pumping the neighbours鈥� kids full of candy.
Samhein was the ancient Celts鈥� New Year鈥檚 Eve. But instead of a celebration of the arrival of a fresh, new year with hopes for a bright future, it was more about mopping up the messes of the old year. Crops were in, firewood was stacked, thatch roofs were repaired 鈥� all in preparation for the miserable cold of the next few months.
There was one item left on the annual chores list: letting go of the year鈥檚 dead. With all the plants dying and leaves falling from trees, it seemed obvious that there was an erosion of the divide between us and the world of the ghosts we all will someday become. It was a time to ensure dead loved ones got safely to the Other Side.
It wasn鈥檛 a loving good-bye. It was making sure ghosts didn鈥檛 stay, sickening the living and damaging crops. Turnips (didn鈥檛 have pumpkins) were carved into gruesome reminders of lost faces, both to scare the local ghosts across the line, and to keep old ghosts from returning while the line was thin.
Samhein became Halloween when Christians decided the Celts needed a new religion.
Christians have never been creative, preferring to steal legends and traditions and even holy places and make them their own. By the time Pope Gregory XIII fixed the old Julian calendar in 1582, the Romans鈥� failure to correct the extra quarter of a day (approximately) of the earth鈥檚 annual orbit had put the seasons and the calendar out of sync by two weeks. So Greg expunged half of October that year, and declared all the saints whose birthdays had been missed would be celebrated on All Hallows Day.
Just as the evening before Christmas Day is Christmas Eve and the evening before New Year鈥檚 Day is New Year鈥檚 Eve, the evening before All Hallows Day was All Hallows Eve, which we chronically lazy westerners abbreviated to Halloween (actually, it was still Hallowe鈥檈n when I was a kid, but like I said, chronically lazy).
So when people annoy you by getting dressed up for fun next week, be thankful you鈥檙e not keeping grandma and grandpa at bay with a turnip.
