The Season of Samhain

Confession time.  I’m not a fan of Halloween.  I just don’t get it. 

It was less of a thing when I was young (but still a thing – as village kids, we trick or treated, in make-shift outfits, on friends and neighbours with moderate success – a mix of sweets and windfall apples).  No Halloween parties though, no months of supermarket aisles stacked with Halloween chocolates and witch/ Dracula outfits.  So perhaps the spirit of Halloween arrived too late to the UK to enmesh its rituals into my life.  

Pumpkins though! Autumn leaves, late harvest fruits, the nights drawing in, the rediscovery of the simplicity of my “boots and a jumper” uniform, crisp mornings and early frosts.  All of that I love, so a celebration at this time of year feel intuitively appropriate.  Just not one that involves blood, horror and threat (I know, I’m a wuss….)

As my exploration of seasonal living continues, I’ve been delving into the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (“Summer’s end”), the celebration that has morphed over time into our modern-day Halloween, to see if I can get on board with that.  After all, I’m always looking for opportunities for a seasonal celebration.

“Samhain is a festival marking the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter or the darker half of the year”

The harvest is in, all is complete, it is the end of the cycle of birth and growth so from nature’s perspective, the point of death. As a festival that emerged at a time when nature’s perspective was everything, it’s natural that Samhain therefore marked the end of one year and the beginning of the next. 

Samhain is also the time of the year when the veil between the conscious and unconscious, the seen and unseen is at its most transparent so for Celts it was a time to honour ancestors and seek messages from the spirit world.  And as the darkness sets in, it’s an occasion to rest and reflect on seasons passed and make plans for the new.  Does this resonate with you?  To me it all feels so very appropriate.….. 

You can feel the roots of all of this somewhere in our Halloween celebrations; its name has changed of course (following the introduction of All Saints day by Pope Gregory III in the eighth century, 31 October became known as All Hallows Eve and from there to Hallow’een), but more than that it just seems to me that we’ve got the messages from our predecessors a little bit distorted. 

By reframing our October festivities as a celebration of Samhain though, I can more easily acknowledge the magic and the optimism and joy born from the knowledge that endings are always followed by new beginnings, death is always followed by rebirth.   Just as the seeds from this year’s harvest lie hidden and dormant in the soil at this notch in our every turning wheel, so too can we stop for a moment and prepare ourselves for germination.

So look out for a Samhain celebration in Quinton Rectory Gardens next year.  There’ll be pumpkins, apple bobbing, seed sowing, hot-chocolate, candles, fire, crisp leaves to kick.  And not a vampire in sight.