Halloween........

 I know, I did a lot of Halloween blogging last year, as I have done for many years, and each year inspire the same thoughts and disappointments, and each year I feel the urge to write it down to get it off my chest, and maybe each year someone reads a new blog and learns something from it and passes it on to the next generation? I'm hopeful anyway.

Halloween, or Samhain as it is properly called has always been one of my favourite festivals of the wheel of the year, since I first really started to learn about the oldest belief systems. Me and my friend Sarah used an old book of mine about fortune telling at Halloween to try and divine our futures. It helped that her birthday was just before Halloween so we always had a double celebration.

We didn't have pumpkins or trick or treating back in those early days, that was for Americans who didn't know better, and now sadly those Americanisms have been taken up by our youth and ruined yet another pagan festival and made it a commercial sugar-fest!

If Halloween fell on our Brownie pack holiday in half-term, we would spend hours hollowing out swedes with a teaspoon! Yep! How to keep a bunch of really young girls quiet for an afternoon, we ate a lot of raw swede on those afternoons. There was no mention of trick or treating and sweets, it just wasn't a thing, but neither was it the celebration that it should have been.

What is Halloween really? Well, it's the start of a new year, the dark hits properly, the land is dormant, the toughest of times are going to hit, relying on foods that have been preserved and stored, and so a feast happens to eat well, use up the last of the fresh foods and fatten up in preparation for the long winter ahead. The veil between our world and the spirit world is at it's thinnest, making communication for advice with those who have passed possible. Bonfires are lit to aid the feasting and to guide the spirit guides to us to advise on how to get through the winter safely. This takes us up to December 21st when the world start to get light again.

There is nothing in that, that dictates going around the neighbourhood begging for future diabetes! 

How can such a wonderful and sacred festival be taken so out of context? It makes me mad and sad, and what also saddens me is the fact that I know most people when asked what Halloween is really about, wouldn't know. These parents parading their dressed up squealing kids about the place, don't know or understand the true meaning.

This has happened a lot with stolen pagan festivals, Christmas for example, what was the Winter Solstice, became a festival about Jesus! Then that got stolen itself, by commercialism, and is now a fast way to get into debt, get fat and have arguments with friends and family. No one thinks about the true meaning of the solstice, the coming of the light, the new growth under the ground, the hope that we can start to have again.

If you are reading this now and already knew about Halloween, that's brilliant, go and tell everyone all about it, educate them. If you didn't already know before reading this, but you know now, then do the same. Share the knowledge, the truth of the festival, and celebrate accordingly.

I am sure my next rant will be coming shortly! Have a wonderful Samhain, chat to those loved ones who have passed, even if it's just a conversation in your head with your memories of them, because you will gain true wisdom that way. And prepare for the darkness.