It’s Halloween week!
There’s a lot that’s fun about Halloween, but something deep in the Celtic part of my brain reminds me that it’s also time for Samhain (SAW-in). This festival celebrates the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter, marking our entry into the darker half of the year.
A few of our Halloween traditions come from Samhain roots. People would go door-to-door in disguise requesting food for Samhain feasts, lighting their way with hollowed-out turnips carved with grotesque faces.
Samhain traditions continue today. I attended the Beltane Fire Society's Samhain Night festival in Edinburgh five years ago, where a procession of various groups includes the Blues of winter and the Reds of summer. The Cailleach wanders to see if Summer is ready to yield or if Winter must take the crown by force. Eventually, the groups join as the Summer King and Winter King battle, with Summer consumed and transformed.
The festival website adds: “At the heart stands the Cailleach, the divine Crone, who asks: ‘Have you lived with care and courage? Have you supported your community, and looked with nuance?’”
These traditions resonate deeply with me as the festival encourages “radical connection: the strength we find in each other, the wisdom of perspective, and the courage to face our shadows.”
As winter’s darkness sets in, let’s navigate it together through that radical connection, and there’s no better place to foster it than here in the Createscape community.
—Chris