Samhain Celebration

And here it is again,  the Approach of Samhain, also celebrated here in Tucson as Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead.  As always, I make up the Beloved Dead Altar .  I make up invites to the Feast of Samhain and make a great big lemon cake, which gets frozen, along with enough vegetarian chili to feed an army. I try to figure out where to get a turkey to bake.   I ask people to bring different things and hope that we don't end up with 20 casseroles.  I play "The Parting Glass" (the theme song) to get myself in the mood.  I buy a lot of candles.

Mostly, though, I remember those on the list, the list that gets longer every year.  So many now that I am in my 70's, so many memories, so many ghosts.  People, animals,  places.  How strange, to be old enough that places as well can be gone........... and I think beyond that as well, thinking about the Shrine for the Lost:  The Sixth Extinction I made last year,  how painful that was to see those long, long lists of recently extinct and vanishing species.  

There is such a poignant, numinous, bitter/sweet quality to October, to the Going Into the Dark time of Samhain.  Everyone feels it I like to think, for all that the sanctity of this time has been so sadly commercialized and trivialized with Halloween and "trick or treat".  

I always include pomogranates along with the pumpkins on my altar, to remember that this is also Persephone's Feast Day,  when that liminal Goddess returns to the Underworld, no longer the Queen of Spring but rather now the Queen of the Dead, the place of endings that become again beginnings.  The important underground realm that comes with the sacred night of Hallowed Eve, the realm where life goes into the Womb of the Earth to rest, to regenerate, to heal and sleep, to await new life in the spring.