There’s more to Halloween than a candy fest with kids dressing up as ghouls and goblins. Trisha Hughes gets ready to celebrate the Day of the Dead
When we think of Halloween our minds conjure up images of ghosts, witches, vampires and monsters. On October 31, you can hardly walk through the plazas or along Headland Drive without bumping into a blood-sucking vampire, a zombie or a witch riding a broomstick. Hollywood and literature have crafted versions of these creatures for us but like many fantastic characters of myth and lore, they have a basis in reality.
Halloween has been called many names through the centuries. The original word “Hallowe’en” actually means “hallowed evening” and the last day of October has also been called All Hallows’ Eve, Day of the Dead, All Saints’ Eve and Samhain (Summer’s End). For centuries it’s been considered one of the most magical nights of the year. It’s a night of supernatural power when we are meant to believe the veil that separates our world from the otherworld is at its thinnest and I, for one, have always been more than a little wary about celebrating the Day of the Dead. Even the air feels different on Halloween.
DAY OF THE DEAD
The Celts believed that the normal laws of space and time were held in abeyance at Samhain, allowing a window to open where the spirit world could intermingle with the living. Many believed it was a night when the dead could cross the veils and physically return to the land of the living to celebrate with their family or clan. As such, burial mounds were lit at midnight, with torches lining crumbling walls, so that the spirits of the dead could find their way in the darkness. Out of this ancient tradition comes one of our most famous icons of the holiday: the Jack-O-Lantern.
The Jack-O-Lantern was used as a light for the lost soul of Jack, a notorious trickster, stuck between worlds. Jack is said to have tricked the devil into the trunk of a tree by carving an image of a cross on it. He successfully trapped the devil but having already been denied access to Heaven, and then having also angered the devil in Hell, Jack became a lost soul. As a consolation, the devil gave him a sole ember to light his way through the darkness between worlds.
Originally, Celts placed candles in hollowed-out turnips to help guide Jack’s lost spirit back home. Hence the term: Jack-O-Lantern. Later, when immigrants came to the new world, pumpkins were more readily available, and so carved- out pumpkins holding a lit candle served the same function.
SUMMER’S END
In one sense, Halloween was a celebration of plenty and homecoming. It was harvest-time and people would have been well fed and they would have gathered in their homes after long days spent working in the fields. Traders, sailors and people with skills to offer journeyed home for the celebrations.
There was, however, the other face of the festival. It ushered in winter, the most frightening, uncomfortable and inconvenient of all the seasons. Even in modern Britain, it is the time when the clocks go back and the night rushes early into the afternoon. Halloween was the feast that prefaced months of darkness, cold, hunger and the physical illnesses consequent of all of those.
What was coming was the season of death – not just of leaves, flowers and light, but of humans, as more would perish in the winter and early spring than at any other time of year. That was why Halloween was widely regarded as the time when the spirits of darkness and fear, the evil and malevolent forces of nature, were let loose upon the earth.
People reacted to this forbidding prospect in two different ways. In ancient times, Halloween was the festival of prophecy in which people gathered together and most frequently tried to predict the future. The prediction most often sought was who would live through the winter. Another reaction was to mock darkness and fear by singing songs about spirits and lighting candles on the graves of the dead. In the 16th century, people began going from house to house impersonating the souls of the dead. They recited verses or songs and received offerings on their behalf, usually a small round cake called a soul cake.
For me, there is magic in a night when pumpkins glow by moonlight. Instead of a terrifying night spent watching fearfully out of windows for movement while bonfires burned brightly, Halloween has become a joyous holiday for families to get together and have a bit of fun by dressing up as ghosts and goblins and wandering the streets with friends. See you on Headland Drive!