All Saints Day/Dias de las Muertes

While we in the United States tend to celebrate death with the macabre festivities of Hallowe’en, I kind of like the old Catholic and Latin traditions of November 1st being a day of celebrating and honoring our own dead family members. Here’s my cheat-sheet on what the deal is… Don’t quote me or anything- this is from my feeble and toddler-addled memory!

Like most holidays we currently celebrate, the roots of these days are lost in the haze of history, and as is so often the case, they are actually thought to be Christian efforts to co-opt more pagan and/or Roman festivals. The roots for Halloween lie in the pagan Celtic festival of Samhain- a day when it was thought the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead was the thinnest.

In an effort to arrest some of the bacchanalian excesses of the Samhain celebrations, the Christian church adopted the following day as All Hallows Day, to encourage the peasants to remember and celebrate the departed dead in Christendom. When this happened, Samhain became All Hallow’s Eve- and you can clearly see the etymology for Hallow’een.

In Spain and Latin America, traditionally October 31- November 2 were the days of the dead. Rather than warding off spirits like the pagans in northern Europe, they celebrated their dead family members with food and visits to cemeteries to clean and decorate graves.

Really, when it gets down to it, all of these festivals and celebrations are to acknowledge the dying of the year, the waning of light in the world (if your seasons are based on the northern hemisphere model), the harvesting of crops and an awareness of ancestry and of death.

In my book, that’s just plain cool.