October 31 is the important Wiccan and Neo-Pagan religious holiday of Samhain, coinciding with the lighthearted secular North American celebration of Halloween. November 1 is the Roman Catholic and Anglican holiday of All Saints Day and November 2 is the Roman Catholic and Anglican holiday of the Feast of All Souls (celebrated as the DÃa de los Muertos or Day of the Dead in Mexico and with variants in some other Latin American and Filipino traditions). Within the Methodist Church, All Saints Day is celebrated on the first Sunday of November (which for 2024 falls on November 3). For Lutherans, the Sunday on or before October 31 (which for 2024 was October 27) is celebrated as Reformation Day.
Samhain
Pronounced SOW-in, Samhain in Gaelic means “Summer’s End” and is a major holiday in both Wicca and in Neo-Pagan religions. It should be noted that some debate regarding when Samhain should be celebrated exists. Some traditions celebrate the holiday on November 1 and others – notably many Wiccans observe the holiday on November 7. Regardless of date, the holiday carries the same significance in marking the end of summer and the final harvest of the year. In most traditions, the Sabbat of Samhain is celebrated for three successive evenings.
Within Wicca and most neo-Pagan traditions, Samhain marks the end of the calendar, and is thus the New Year’s celebration. For this reason, Samhain is a time for renewal as well as for giving thanks for the harvest as winter approaches. Traditionally, Samhain is the last chance for harvesting any remaining crops or picking any remaining produce from one’s garden. Samhain is also a time for remembering things past, especially those who have died. It is therefore a holiday for honoring the dead (both human and animal) and particularly for calling to mind loved ones who have passed away.
One common tradition is to visit cemeteries on or just before Samhain eve to clean headstones as well as to make gravestone rubbings. It is common to hold a cemetery dinner on Samhain's eve. As Patti Wigington explains, this has none of the morbid feeling of night time cemetery visits held by other religions:
In a lot of communities, a huge part of visiting a cemetery involves a meal. It’s not morbid at all — in fact, it’s a joyful celebration that includes family members who have crossed over. You can pack up a picnic supper, and visit your family at the cemetery while you eat. Wigington (2021)
It is also common to eat food as well as bring a plate for the deceased (although, as Wigington warns, many cemeteries prohibit leaving even flowers, let alone offerings). Where possible, Wiccans and neo-Pagans bring favorite meals of their loved one who have died.
Samhain traditions vary regarding the nature of cemetery visits. For many, gathering at the graves of one's loved ones is a time of lively -- and even loud -- celebration. This can include telling stories about those who have passed away or singing their favorite songs,
Quite an opposite Samhain tradition is the practice known as the "Silent Supper" (or "Dumb Supper"). Here people are just as likely to gather in a home or -- if outdoors -- in a grove as they are in a graveyard. A table is draped in a tablecloth with chairs draped in the same color cloth. The table too is set with candles of that color. The color is either all white or all black (depending on one's own tradition). The table is set with plates, including a plate at the head of the table left for deceased loved ones. The photograph below, from the Original Botanica article
"Performing Samhain Ritualss for Halloween" (Oct 2, 2023) , shows a Samhain table set for the Silent Supper.
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| Samhain Table set for Silent Supper |
Whatever the location, people take part in the meal in total silence. Each person brings a dish to share to a grove As Grand Archdruid in the Ancient Order of Druids in America Dana O'Driscoll explains:
In silence, then, participants prepare two plates–a larger plate for themselves and a smaller plate for their ancestors. The silence descends upon the table and deepens as each druid communes in silence with the ancestors of the land, of their blood, of their tradition, and of their craft. The air feels heavy with the presence of so many spirits. As the meal concludes, participants take a candle and walk out in the dark to leave their ancestor offering outdoors and light the path for their ancestors to return across the veil. (O'Driscoll, 2022)
It is important to note that for Wiccans, Druids. and for most neo-Pagan worshippers, this is not a form of ancestor or spirit worship but rather an honoring of the Cycle of Life and Death.
Samhain is also a time to honor animals – particularly pets and other animals among whom we share our lives – since animals are seen as providing us with sustenance in the form of food and clothing. Because of this, Samhain is a time to honor those pets who have died over the last year. In some traditions, animals are seen as protecting us from spirits that would harm us and other things that inhabit the darkness.
Relatedly, some who celebrate Samhain also believe that this is the time of year when the veil is thinnest between this world and the Otherworld (the realm of spirits and the home of the dead). Consequently, for worshippers who hold to this belief, Samhain provides an opportunity for communicating with the spirit realm and the dead.
Within both Wicca and Neo-Paganism, Samhain is often marked by worship at an altar (or at times in the house at the kitchen room table) with offerings of the harvest.
Wiccan altars differ from neo-Pagan altars. Wiccan altars deal more with the seasonal change and remembering ancestors during this dark point in the Cycle of Life and Death. Wiccan altars, such as the one below featured on the UK's
Religion Media Centre's
Samhain website feature incense, black candles (for the transformation and rebirth). white candles (for peace and innocence as well as mourning for the passing of the sun), seasonal herbs such as rosemary and mugwort, pumpkins and other late harvest bounty. It is often common as well to include photographs or other remembrance devices for one's ancestors who have passed away.
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| Wiccan Samhain Altar |
By contrast, some (certainly not all) neo-Pagan worshipers regard Samhain not only as a time to recall the dead but when the spirits of one's ancestors actually cross over briefly into the realm of the living.
The neo-Pagan altar shown below from Autumn Willow at
Flying the Hedge.com provides a number for each typical altar item.
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| Neo-Pagan Samhain Altar |
Willow explains these as
- White candles and lanterns symbolizing the death of the Sun. The white candles are a sign of mourning for the loss of the Sun. The lanterns are, for some, meant as a source of light to guide the spirits that cross over to visit their ancestors during the holiday.
- Feathers representing the "Otherworld" or spirit realm. Feathers are also seen as a way to lift one's prayers.
- Crystals amplifying protection, magic and psychic abilities.
- Antlers and animal skulls representing the change of season (deer lose their antlers in winter) and the time of death (skulls can be particular to the worshippers connection to a specific animal, in this photo, a fox).
- Pumpkins and squash representing the final harvest of the season.
Many people present their altar offerings in a horn of plenty (called a cornucopia, and now closely associated with the US secular holiday of Thanksgiving), and customarily include home-baked dark bread as well as nuts, berries, fruits and vegetables.
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| Soul Cakes |
Among the Samhain foods with the longest traditions is that of "soul cakes." Since pre-Christian times, people in the England, Scotland and Ireland have left muffin-like soul cakes accompanied by a glass of wine or milk for the souls of those who had recently passed away. The Celtic pagan tradition predates by centuries the adoption of "soul cakes" left on the eve of the Feast of All Souls, the Christianized version of Samhain (see below). One recipe for soul cakes can be found at
http://allrecipes.co.uk/recipe/8607/soul-cakes.aspxOften people include a a Wiccan Star or a statue of the Goddess. Candles are lit on the altar in many traditions, and are often accompanied by photographs of loved ones who have passed on to the other side. Prayers honoring the day are said either before or after a festive meal is eaten featuring the offerings and often accompanied by cider or mulled wine and wild game.
All Saints Day
Roman Catholicism
All Saints Day is one of the 14 worldwide holy days of obligation of the Roman Catholic Church. As with all holy days of obligation, All Saints Day begins with a vigil on the night preceding it.
A special Roman Catholic mass is conducted for All Saints Day to remember the saints and martyrs of the Church, both those known and unknown. In many congregations, rituals include the use a crown and a sheaf of wheat. Many congregational services also make use of images of the saints and of the Manus Dei (the Hand of God with rays of light extending from it).
Another name in English for the holy day is All Hallowmas Halloween is actually the name of the date of the vigil on the night before All Saints Day.. By the mid 1500’s as vernacular languages began to replace Latin in religious usage, the holiday was called All Hallowmas (the word Hallow – from to hallow -- meant Saint at the time). The vigil on the night before All Hallowmas was called All Hallows Even (shortened by the 1600’s to Hallowe’en).
All Saints Day is one of the oldest holy days of obligation in Christianity. As early as 407, St. John Chrysostom first assigned a date for All Saints Day; that date, however, was not November 1, but rather the first Sunday following Pentecost. This remains the date for Eastern Orthodox Christians where the holiday is officially known as the Sunday of All Saints. The original holiday was dedicated to Saint John the Baptist and those martyred for the Church. (as by the early 5th Century there were so many martyred saints that they could no longer readily each have their own day on the Church calendar).
As described below, Pope Gregory III (731-741) moved the date of All Saints Day within the Roman Catholic Church to its current date of November 1, making it a pilgrimage date within Italy, and in 835 Pope Gregory IV extended All Saints Day to apply worldwide.
Protestantism
The role of saints became questioned among Protestants following the Reformation in the early 1500’s. The debate of the role of saints led to divisions in the traditions of how Protestants continued to observe All Saints Day.
Some Protestant movements continued (and still continue) directly to observe All Saints Day. In the Anglican Church, All Saints Day is observed on or immediately following October 31. The Anglican and
Episcopalian Churches recognize saints as people who have been notably sanctified.
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| Swedish cemetery on Alla Helgons Dag |
In the
Swedish Lutheran Church, All Saints Day (
Alla Helgons Dag) continues to be a holiday and is observed as a national civic holiday on the Saturday following October 30 and as a religious holiday on the first Sunday of November. In
Sweden, the Saturday of
Alla Helgons Dag became a national civic holiday only in 1952 and is used by people to visit the graves of family members who have passed away and to decorate their gravesites.
In both the Anglican and
Swedish Lutheran Church, the holiday remembers saints. It should be noted that in these traditions, all Christians are saints, but particular honor for historical saints is allowed as representing individuals who have received extraordinary grace and as people who can inspire others to lead exemplary lives.
All Saints Day is one of the three main holidays (along with Easter and Christmas) of the
United Methodist Church. Methodists celebrate the holiday on the first Sunday in November.
It is important to note, though, that Methodists do not venerate or worship saints (and John Wesley specifically forbade Methodists from doing so). For Methodists, all people are saints (although they recognize important Biblical figures by their common names as saints). Methodists, therefore, do not worship or venerate the saints but rather honor all holy Biblical people on All Saints Day. The holiday is also used as a day of remembrance not only for Biblical saints but, significantly, for all who have died in their particular congregations. Thus, on All Saints Day in many Methodist congregations, an acolyte reads of the names of those congregational members who have died.
Other Protestant denominations including the Presbyterians, Unitarian and a minority among some Baptist congregations also have some service recognizing All Saints Day.
Feast of All Souls and the DÃa de los Muertos
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| Saint Odilo of Cluny |
November 2 in Roman Catholicism is the Feast of All Souls. Its official name is
"The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed" and it commemorates those among the faithful who have passed away. The holiday dates to 998 when the holiday St. Odilo of Cluny set November 2 as a time to pray for the dead in Purgatory at his Abbey of Cluny. The practice was widely copied and spread throughout much of Europe, eventually transforming from a prayer for those in Purgatory to a commemoration of those among the faithful who had died. With Roman Catholicism as a whole, the Feast of All Souls is considered a minor religious observance, not on the same order as that of All Saints Day.
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| Mictecacihuatl |
By contrast, in several Roman Catholic national traditions, the Feast of All Souls has taken on a much greater significance than elsewhere. This is especially the case in Mexico, where the holiday is celebrated as DÃa de los Muertos or Day of the Dead. A Day of the Dead had preceded Christianity by centuries in Mexico, with evidence of some practice of a related holiday dating back over 2000 years. When the Spanish arrived in Mexico, they found that their Feast of All Souls corresponded with the worship among Aztecs and others of the goddess Mictecacihuatl who was Queen of Mictlan or the Underworld. The Roman Catholic Church syncretized the worship of Mictecacihuatl, replacing her veneration with that of the Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus. Mictecacihuatl, known as the Sante Muerte (Saint Death) or simply the Dama de la Muerte (
Lady of the Dead) is still present in some Mexican celebrations.
In
Mexico, the
DÃa de los Muertos is major holiday on which people go to graveyards to visit the graves of their dead relatives. It should be noted that this holiday shares little if any of the North American uneasiness with death or with graveyards. Instead, the Mexican version of the holiday celebrates the unity between life and death and recognizes a strong sense of belief in the afterlife. The
DÃa de los Muertos is a very festive time with people bringing photos and favorite foods of their deceased loved ones to the gravesites. Commonly people bring to the cemetery skulls made of sugar or marzipan with the name of the deceased one on the forehead. Other special foods include candied pumpkins and the sweet soft bun decorated with pretend bones called pan de muerto (bread of the day). Throughout Mexico, marigolds (called Flores del Muerto or Flowers of Death) are used to decorate for the holiday (a tradition with origins in the Aztec rituals). It is also a time in which children are given toys, often with a skeleton theme (such as skeleton dolls or papier mache figures). In many homes, government offices and workplaces, people erect special altars centered around an image of the Virgin Mary with offerings to the departed placed there.
Many traditions for the DÃa de los Muertos are regional in nature. These involve wearing skull masks, erecting skelton sculptures, having mariachi bands play while dressed as skeletons, having weddings of skeleton marionettes or of people dress as skeletons, wearing special clothing with regional ties to the holiday and holding dances or parades.
In 2008, the UNESCO officially inscribed DÃa de los Muertos celebrations as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Holidays similar to the Mexican
DÃa de los Muertos are celebrated in the elsewhere in
Latin America. In Guatemala, the holiday is called
DÃa de los Difuntos (which also means Day of the Dead) and is celebrated by visiting graves, flying kites and eating a special salad called
fiambre made up of up to 50 different ingredients and only eaten once a year during the holiday.
Bolivia’s indigenous people celebrate
Dia de los Natitas (Day of the Skulls) in which indigenous peoples bring to Church the actual (not sugar) skulls of their dead which many traditionally keep in their homes.
Similar practices (without the actual skulls) are conducted among the Quechua-speaking community in
Ecuador on All Souls Day. All Souls Day is also widely celebrated in
Brazil where it is also called
Finados, and people visit the graves of relatives. Outside of Latin America, Day of the Dead celebrations are practiced widely in the Philippines where it is called Todos los Santos (All Saints Day) in Spanish but Araw ng mga Patay ("Day of the Dead") in Tagalog and celebrated as a two-day family with visits to the graveyard and parties for the extended family.
All Souls Day is an official public civic holiday for public employees in
Angola,
Belgium,
Bolivia,
Brazil,
Ecuador,
El Salvador,
Haiti,
Mexico and
Uruguay. It is also an official holiday in the
US territory of Guam.
Reformation Day
Many Protestant denominations celebrate Reformation Day on the first Sunday on or following October 31.
Reformation Day is a public civic holiday in the nation of
Slovenia as well as in the five predominantly Lutheran German Länder (states) of
Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and
Thuringia.
Martin Luther began the Reformation by nailing his 95 Theses on the door of
Wittenberg Church on the Eve of All Saints Day, October 31, 1517. Reformation Day is a holiday to commemorate this event for many Protestant denominations.
For these denominations, Reformation Day was also a way of repurposing All Saints Day. These denominations are either opposed to the concept of All Saints Day, some because of its association with the Roman Catholic Church or because of their refutation of the concept of sainthood (or both). In many Protestant denominations, some of the features of All Saints Day are combined with those of All Souls Day as worshipers remember those among the faithful or among one’s local congregation who have passed away.
The first recorded Reformation Day was decreed by law in 1569 in the officially Lutheran former German Duchy of Pomerania on what had been
Saint Martin’s Day (November 11), because it bore the name of Lutheranism’s founder, Martin Luther. The
practice of observing Reformation Day was taken up by several other officially Lutheran States but without consistency as to practice or even date. Some uniformity took hold on the 100
th anniversary of the Reformation in 1617. In that year, Reformation Day was observed on October 31 and November 1 among all of the Lutheran nations throughout what is now
Germany (Germany as a single nation did not exist until 1871).
Among Lutheran churches today, the observances are mixed. For many Lutheran churches, the observance of Reformation Sunday is on the Sunday on or before October 1, with a separate holiday of All Saints Day on the Sunday on or following November 1. Lutherans, it should be pointed out, do not generally believe in saints in the same way as do Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox or Anglicans. For Lutherans, therefore, All Saints Day is a lesser holiday used to remember saints both dead and living and to honor Jesus Christ.
Some Evangelical and Pentecostal Christian movements have begun to use Reformation Day as a way to repurpose the secular holiday of Halloween. For many Evangelical and Pentecostal Christians, Halloween is an offensive holiday. As the Evangelical Director of the Children’s Ministry International, Brad Winsted asks,
“For so many Halloween presents a dilemma, what do you do with a holiday with roots in the occult?”
http://www.cbn.com/spirituallife/onlinediscipleship/halloween/reformation_day.aspx Minister Winsted’s answer is to repurpose Halloween as Reformation Day.
Halloween, OÃche Shamhna and All Saints Eve
The secular version of All Hallows Eve or Halloween is an especially popular holiday in the English-speaking world. The secular holiday has its roots in the religious holidays of Samhain and is called OÃche Shamhna (Samhain Night) in Ireland even by those who do not practice Wicca or Neo-Paganism. The secular holiday has spread to many non-English-speaking countries beginning roughly in the 1990’s, where it has been viewed mostly as a US import.
During Colonial times, North America was largely opposed to Halloween celebrations. Celebrations of All Saints Day were banned and any suspected ties to witchcraft were highly condemned (although not all as dramatically as the Salem Witch Trials). There is no formal record of Halloween having been practiced anywhere until the mid-19th Century. Thus, Halloween was not commonly celebrated in the United States until the late 19th Century, following the Irish Famine of the 1840’s. The holiday seems to have grown out of Scottish immigration to Canada in a similar manner.
The Commercialization of Halloween
By the beginning of the 20th Century, Halloween had devolved to an evening in which teenagers played pranks including property damage and assaults, a tradition grown from the English practice of Mischief Night (still practiced in some US cities as Devil’s Night on the night of October 30). Countering movements tried to commercialize Halloween as a night of safer entertainment in which children dressed up with the first commercially produced hand-made Halloween costumes appearing in the first decade of the 20th Century. In 1912, the Boy Scouts of America became involved in ensuring the safety with a “Sane Halloween” campaign that was largely successful. It was from here that the custom of trick-or-treating from door to door had its roots in the United States and Canada. Halloween celebrants were encouraged to turn the celebration into what was called “Beggar’s Night” to request a treat in return for not carrying out a trick (e.g., property damage). This trick-or-treating grew considerably more widespread during the Depression. By the mid-1930’s, manufacturers began to sell mass-produced Halloween costumes and decorations.
Halloween in Hard Times: The Great Depression and the COVID-19 Pandemic
Halloween served both as a stress relief for adults during the Depression as well as a source of sweets (given by those better off) for poorer children who would not otherwise be able to afford them.
In fact, the US National Retail Federation (NRF) found that in 2020 only 58% of Americans plan to celebrate, a massive drop from the highpoint in 2017 and 2018 with over 70% indicating they will celebrate the holiday (the figure was 72% in 2017, the highest percentage ever recorded). In both 2017 and 2018, sales of Halloween-related products and candy were over $9.0 billion (easily exceeding the previous record of 2016's $8.4 billion). The trend for high Halloween spending remains entrenched now with three years -- 2016, 2017 and 2018 --exceeding the previous record high of $7.98 billion in 2012. In 2018, sales fell mildly for only the third time since 2005 with sales of Halloween-related products and candy have been on an upward trajectory. In 2020, by contrast overall spending fell by a billion dollars to $8.05 billion.
