the Trick or Treaters are all home getting ready for school tomorrow or may-be even asleep by now now.
Sometime tomorrow the spider webs and skeletons, jack-o-lanterns and bats will packed away for next year. Softly the messages from the old ones will fade as the worlds grow apart and and with dawns light, it will be a new year.
Perhaps not officially, but for a very long time I have reckoned my years this way. As did our ancestors, the harvest was over, the fields were silent, dormant, and resting.
The ancestors had celebrated with use and we with them, and now it is time for the long sleep of winter.
Halloween, being the final celebration of the year, bonfires on hilltops and soul cakes, a night of accepted rebellion. A night when one could dare to dress up as anything they would like to be, and hope for great joy in the New Year. The idea was that a revelers should dress up as someone that was above their current station in life, in hopes that this would influence their chances of improving their lot in the new year.
The old year is dying fast, and the last flickering stumps of candles sputter, flicker and dim in the jack-o-lanterns grin, even the jack-o-lanterns features remind us of the inevitability of death, as it must reminded our ancestors, who's chances of making it thought the bleakness of winter were not at all certain. But their revelries with death like the more modern Dia de los Muertos celebration remind us that that there is always hope.
Great Joy in the New!
