An Alternative Halloween

Our Samhain altar honoring ancestors & departed loved ones.

If you are looking for a different Halloween celebration during the pandemic, consider honoring your ancestors and remembering loved ones you've lost. This is at the core of an ancient holiday known as Samhain, which we celebrate every October 31st. It is believed that the veil between this world and the next is thin on the night of Samhain, allowing the spirits to walk among us. We do things to show them we remember and honor them, and we might receive their messages, if we are listening.

Our celebration includes:

• Building an altar with photos and mementos of those who have passed on.
• Setting  a plate for them at our dinner table, and telling stories during our feast of those we miss or ancestors we want to honor.
  
• For a bit of fun, we might carve pumpkins or make "dead bread."
• We build a fire and meditate on the mysteries of death.
• We put the ancestor's plate outside overnight as an offering and light a candle on the graves of our beloved cats, leaving them a saucer of milk.
  
• This year, we will also honor those who have died during the pandemic.

Samhain was the precursor to current Halloween celebrations- we dress up so that roaming angry spirits don't recognize or harm us. We prefer to think of our spirits as benign and welcome them back with our memories.

Click to see all the details about how we celebrate Samhain.

Happy Samhain!

We leave an offering for the spirits outside overnight (above) including some of the "Dead Bread" we make in the shape of skeletons (below).