Samhain/halloween

Today is Samhain (Pre-Christian festival) which Halloween has evolved from (Julia don’t cringe too much at the preposition at the end of the sentence.)

It marks the end of the harvest, the beginning of winter or the dark half of the year. It proceeds Nov. 1, Toussaint or All Saints Day, a legal holiday in many Catholic countries. The Catholic Church sometime in the 9^th century changed All Saints’ Day to Nov. 1 while All Souls’ Day was set for Nov. 2.

Halloween (contraction of All Hallows’ Evening) in religious terms was dedicated to remembering the dead.

In Ireland, cattle were returned from summer pasture, and some slaughtered for winter provisions. It was seen as a day when spirits could enter the human sphere.

People would hollow out turnips and put candles in them to light their route as they celebrated the day with feasts.  They went door to door, begging for food (probably not many Mars bars or Hershey kisses were handed out.)

Now in some countries, it’s more a kid’s holiday and a chance for stores to sell lots of candy and costumes for trick or treating.

As a child, my over-protective mother never let me go out, but I baked Halloween cookies with my grandmother and made up packages with orange-coloured napkins with the cookies and candy and handed them out to the kids who were allowed out.

By the time my daughter was of trick or treat age, we went to homes of those we knew for already sick people were putting razors in apples. My over protective mother was about two decades ahead of her time in worry.

One year we had a Halloween party for my daughter, which was great until one little girl was pushed down the stairs and broke her foot.

Halloween was not celebrated in Switzerland when I first came here in 1990. One American couple did hold a halloween costume party. Cultural difference screamed when all the Americans showed up in homemade costumes and the Swiss rented costumes.