Hallowe'en is the general public's ghastly shorthand for something they've either never understood in the first place or have long forgotten, buried in the fearful part of the soul they'd prefer to think they don't possess. Hallowe'en is cheap thrills, gratuitously bad movies, fake blood, pumpkins, witches with green skin and vampires in cloaks. It's all the worst clichés of horror you could imagine. Most of all, I detest the importation of 'trick or treat' to British shores, with its free license to kids to bang on strangers' doors demanding sweets, often without even having fulfilled their end of the unspoken bargain by making any kind of effort to dress up in costume. And have you noticed how so many of them mouth 'trick or treat', but if you actually don't have a treat for them, they have no idea what to do, because everyone's just been programmed to give them stuff? I fail to see why I should stock up on chocolate - something with which I don't treat myself, because it's an unaffordable luxury - to feed other folks' kids who'd cross the street to avoid me on any other day of the year.
The whole thing is a dreadful Americanisation of a truly beautiful time of year, and I loathe it more each time it rolls around. Even the name, Hallowe'en, that contraction that very rarely even gets spelled correctly - this is one occasion where the apostrophe is needed - has started to irritate me.
All Hallow's Eve, All Souls, Samhain... all these names conjure up something entirely different, entirely other to the everyday, but without any of the fakery and tackiness that the H words inspires. And all these terms bring me back to the true meaning of the day, of this time of year. I know, it's like talking about the true spirit of Christmas - you know it's not going to be popular, and everyone will groan and roll their eyes and think you're just being a killjoy - but we've lost so much by trivialising this ancient turning point of the year into a smorgasbord of ghouls and ghastliness.
Because don't get me wrong, I love this time of year. I love the early morning mists and that first nip in the air, the first frost on the ground, spangling the spider-webs and making them look like silly string. I love the autumnal colours in the trees, and carpeting the ground as the trees shed their glory for another year. I love the fierce wind tugging at my hair. I love putting on my snugly beanie hat and my gloves and my scarf. I love the type of cooking this time of year brings out in me: hearty casseroles served with maple-roasted parsnips, tajines laden with Moroccan spices to warm the soul, rich home-made soups, and good old toad in the hole with lashings of onion gravy. I even - though I might moan about it a little - like the fact that it's dark in the mornings and you feel like you're walking to work in the middle of the night some days.
All of this stuff is right, it's what this time of year should be about. It's the last harvest, it's hibernating against the change in weather, it's bracing yourself for the long months of winter to come. Just like in spring, it's watching Nature for all those signs she gives that the Earth is changing again. The trees shedding their leaves, the squirrels' frantic activity, the hawthorn berries swelling deep scarlet in the hedgerow. There's a lovely sense of time passing, inexorable, untouched by the daily grind of human life in all its myriad stupidities. And there's nothing more wonderful than coming in out of the cold to a roaring fire in a country pub and feeling your body thaw out under the caress of a glass of mulled cider.
There is something completely epic about this time of year, and we ignore it at our peril. Look at what Nature's doing - the weather changing, the trees shutting down, animals either hibernating or escaping south to warmer climes. Everything is on the move, preparing, organising, expectant and sensing that something big, something intense and powerful and even threatening is coming. Unlike the same flurry of activity in spring, there's a sense of danger in the air, and if you try, you can palpably feel that change coming, that new, darker energy sweeping away the last memories of summer and ushering in a period of reflection and stillness.
Those of a mystical bent will say that at Samhain, the veil between our physical world and the world of spirit, or the world of the dead, is pushed aside, or made thinner somehow, allowing deeper knowledge of the workings of the universe. At Samhain, those in the know leave offerings for their departed, and seek communion with their dead. This isn't because they're trying to scare themselves with ghost stories, it's because they know there's nothing to fear from the supernatural, the occult, the hidden, because they work with it all year round and have seen all its faces. They reflect on what the past cycle of the year has given them, what it has taken away, and how it has altered the path they're on. Most people, bereft of their spiritual path, do such soul-searching - if they bother at all - on the entirely meaningless date of 31st December. They make New Year's resolutions, usually accepting even then that they'll have fallen by the wayside before January's over. But nothing - nothing but a number on a calendar invented for convenience - changes on 31st December.
In the weeks running between mid October and mid November, everything changes, and the midpoint of that explosion of activity is Samhain, and if you bother to attune to it, you can actually feel that it's the end of one year and the beginning of another. This year (2010 by the calendar) is amazingly powerful as it falls on a last quarter moon, a waning moon, a dying moon. There's a certain rightness about that to my mind, old cycles closing down in readiness for the new year that begins in winter, as life begins in winter, germinating hidden beneath the ground, biding its time before spring teases new life upwards again into the light.
I feel the cold bitterly, and I suffer badly with it, I can't deny that. I find the endless darkness of winter rather dispiriting, and working through the scant hours of sunlight and not feeling it on my skin for months on end is depressing. I don't have heating at home, and when it turns really bitter, I struggle even to get out of bed. But the energy in the air at this time of year is so awesome, so overwhelming, that even if the cold brings me down, the magik in the atmosphere uplifts me in some secret corner of my soul. I find myself smiling at the gale force wind, the lashing rain (at least when I'm safely indoors and not trudging through it), kicking up piles of golden leaves on my way to work and re-finding my inner child on a solitary walk through the forest, filled with a glow of unspeakable joy to find myself eye to eye with a squirrel caught out foraging.
I am a winter baby. I was, as my Dad's fond of telling me, born in the teeth of a blizzard. I suppose in some way the cold's in my blood, the winter's in my soul. It's a part of who I am, whether I like it or not. I crave heat and sunshine in summer, and am often sorely disappointed as it's never hot enough for me in this country - I'm also apparently part reptile, because I've only ever felt warm enough in African climes - but there's something very satisfying about autumn, the crispness of winter on its breath, the memory of summer banished for what seems like forever. It's probably the season I love most in this country, because it's so well defined. You can spot autumn by its colours and its scents, even when summer's been a washout and winter's a dull blur of endless rain that eventually turns into a tepid spring. Autumn is a beacon of fire, a last flare of life and excitement before the world grows quiet and reflective again through the darker months of the year.
Samhain is the perfect time for reflection, for meditation, for staying indoors with a good book, snuggled up in bed with a hot water bottle. It's nice to take time out from the usual routine and just pamper your soul. In an ideal world, I'd spend it tucked away from everyone, reviewing my life so far and considering what I've got left to achieve before I'm satisfied I've done enough and can pack off to the great beyond, the holding pen before my next incarnation. Death hangs close at Samhain, but not in a way that requires me to be frightened by imaginary phantoms. It's a comfort, feeling those who've jumped this planet before me come back again for a while, to remind me what I'm still here for.
My old familiar, my cat Pushkin, died three days before Samhain five years ago. I know he never entirely left me, he's made his presence felt in all sorts of ways since his passing, but he feels closer to me now than at any other time of the year, and even though he never saw the house I live in now, I know I'll hear his velvet pads on the staircase tonight, his broken-voiced little 'mehhh' echoing in the stillness of the evening, and that's a huge source of comfort to me in my solitude.
While the rest of the world is going nuts with enforced jollity in pretending to be scared, dressing up and laughing at the things they'd fear to face head-on in their true forms, I'll be still and at peace and let those nameless terrors into my home, because I know I have nothing to fear from them. My spiritual work has brought me into contact with things from which most people who gallop blindly after Hallowe'en thrills once a year would run screaming if forced to confront, so maybe I'm just immune to it all. I've seen a lot of what's really out there, and in all honesty, the dark side of Nature and the supernatural is a far less frightening sight than much of what I experience every day from ordinary humanity, and I know where I feel safest, and what scares me more.
So yes, I love Samhain, but Hallowe'en... you can keep it.
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