Hallowtide

When I was a child, Halloween was largely unknown in my native country. It was an eccentric tradition celebrated in England and the United States. The Hallowtide season, which begins on Halloween or All Hallows Eve and includes All Saints (1 November) and All Souls (2 November), did have its highlights, though.

In Austria and other Catholic countries, each day of the year is dedicated to a particular saint, 31 October to St. Wolfgang, my patron saint. In my family, it was tradition to receive a small present on one’s Namenstag (saint’s day). 31 October was also, probably still is, Weltspartag, “world savings day”, which was entirely inappropriately named because nobody outside of Austria and perhaps less than a handful of other countries has ever heard about it. Children used to take the year’s savings in their piggy banks to the bank, where the money was counted and, together with accrued interest, recorded in their savings accounts, which came with a little book the size and shape of a passport. You were then allowed to choose a small present from what looked to me like huge, magical stocks. One year, I remember, the present was a self-assembly kite, which I went to try out the same day.

A Halloween altar prepared not out of religious motivation but to mark the time of year.

The weather around this time of year is fixed in my memory: 31 October would be a glorious autumn day, crisp and blustery with lots of red and yellow leaves on the ground and the sky more grey than blue, announcing a change in seasons. 1 November was invariably cold, miserable and very foggy. It was never like this at all, probably, but this is how I remember and cherish it.

During my childhood, on 1 November, All Saints Day, I would be dragged to the graveyard, where we put candles on relatives’ graves. Then we stood by the graves for a few minutes in silence, my parents contemplating the relative’s life or the sadness of their death and I concentrating on my painfully cold toes. There were a few sets of relatives to get through, all having been inconsiderate during their lifetimes by insisting on being buried in different graveyards. This routine, to me then boring and pointless, came with the bonus that 1 November is a public holiday in Austria and I did not have to go to school.

In the evening, in an act of further compensation for cold toes, we might have one of our simple (i.e. mother did not have to cook) winter meals – strong, black tea taken with lemon and sugar and sardines on buttered slices of rye bread. That was before we got television or central heating and still sat together as a family occasionally in the evenings.

Halloween (Hallowe’en), or All Hallows Eve, is the beginning of the brief autumn season, which consists of Halloween, All Saints (1 November) and All Souls (2 November).

Halloween bonfires were lit to ward off evil spirits and to bring light into darkness.

Long before Christianity began to remember the dead at this time of year at around the ninth century, Hallowtide was a holy season, when the barriers between this world and the next were down – a dangerous and magical time, when supernatural forces were strong, pagan gods might walk among mortals, the spirits of the dead returned to earth to visit their homes and spirits were at their most mischievous and destructive.

Pagan Celts celebrated the feast of Samhain on 1 November to mark the end of the summer and the day, on which winter and the new year started.

Halloween bonfires also provided a setting for enjoyment, dancing and innocent games.

The tradition of Halloween fires continued until the late 19^th Century. In England, Halloween is almost entirely neglected as a festival now, apart from providing excitement for children, driven by the commercial potential of trick and treating.

The Halloween fires, though, survive in the form of Guy Fawkes’ bonfires on 5 November or the nearest convenient weekend.

Innocent divination games, such as the Tarot, were used on All Hallows Eve to learn about the year ahead.

Halloween traditions are strikingly similar to what we know as New Year customs, such as symbols banishing the dark (Yule logs), boisterous games and foretelling the future.

Bibliography

1. Hole, Christina (1976) A Dictionary of British Folk Customs: Granada Publishing Limited in Paladin Books (1978)
2. Jones, Alison (1995) Dictionary of World Folklore, Edinburgh: Larousse plc (paperback edition 1996)
3. Wikipedia: Samhain
4. Hardy, Thomas (1878) The Return of the Native (Penguin Classics): Oxford’s World Classics (Oxford University Press), edition 2005

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