According to someone authoritative, before there was Halloween, there was Samhain. Actually, most people know that Halloween is actually “All Hallows Eve,” the night before the feast day of All Souls. Fewer people know that All Hallow’s Eve and All Saints Day are followed by the feast of All Souls. These three days encompass the period of time that the Celts referred to as Samhain. This three day pagan festival of remembrance of the ancestors was Christianized by the start of the Second Millennium in the church’s ongoing attempt to unify Europe.
In days of yore, saints were the people we knew for sure had made it to heaven. Yay saints! All Souls Day was to remember “the faithful departed,” those who had died in the church but were probs in purgatory working off sins. Their feast day was a good time to pray for them and shorten their time. One might question why they shouldn’t let the time serve them, instead of merely serving time.
[Editor’s note: This brownie is very rich.]
One might also question whether they are serving time at all, or what kind of meaning time has in eternity. Enough people have, in fact, questioned this that we really don’t talk about Purgatory no more. Some folks have dug back to the earliest days of the church when every member was called a “saint.” So if we remember all the faithful departed on All Saints, what are we to do with All Souls?
I, for one, am taking All Souls back. Way back. Back to Samhain as a matter of fact. There is, you see, good reason to question my mother’s membership in the Communion of Saints. She may have, at the time she died, participated in a Christian Church. She for sure participated in an “Earth Based Spiritual Community.” I don’t know that she would have called herself a witch or this community a coven, but she would not have minded other people using those words.
She also would not mind being remembered on Samhian, that period of time when the veil between our world and the next becomes particularly thin. It’s that time of year where we can do and say things that draw the ancestors nearer. So I go to Krispy Kreme and get a chocolate iced kreme filled and a cup of coffee.
When I was a kid, and when we were feeling blue, my mother and I would go to the Krispy Kreme on Thompson Lane and Nolensville Road. It was a big ol’ Krispy Kreme, with exterior windows that slanted out and a huge doughnut plant that cranked out hot ones now. After enough trial and error, I learned that the chocolate iced kreme filled was the one for me. Not custard filled. My mother would get coffee.
So some time between Halloween and All Souls Day, I go to Krispy Kreme. I have a doughnut and a cup of coffee. I smile at the other people coming in and listen to the woman behind the counter carry on. I take a dozen back for the guys in the warehouse. It’s a nice time.