Adam@Home by Rob Harrell for October 27, 2009

Something is wrong with their skin color, they look kind of ghoulish.

Adjust your set, CM

mine is OK!

Un-a-costumed as I am for public speaking…..etc

I wouldn’t give treats to teens who don’t bother with a costume either.

with your manly looks (lol) adam, they won’t trick you

Mine is okay now too. It was probably just my eyeballs.

That’s okay CarMummy. Just take a look at the Avatars of the people that you hang out with all day. snerk

Cleo naked corpsakaya, I resemble that remark!

No costume, no candy. Unless it’s at the very end of the curfew.

Wear a Bernie Madoff costume AND NO CANDY at MY house!!!

All Hallows Eve is a hybrid of the Celtic harvest festival Samhain (“Summer’s End”) and the Catholic All Saints (Hallows) Day.

All Saints Day (Nov. 1) and All Souls Day (Nov. 2 or 3) are days on which prayers and rememberances for the dead are supposedly especially effective for getting souls out of Purgatory, and tradition holds that on the evening of All Hallows Day (Hallow E’en), the spirits of those souls who are awaiting entrance to Heaven are allowed to walk the Earth and plead for intercessary prayer. If these spirits are not appeased by gifts of food, they might cause mischief.

Samhain was, as I said, primarily a harvest festival, but in agrarian pagan tradition the changes of the seasons were highly significant, and were thought to be once again particularly effective times to work magic rituals.

Our American observances of Halloween are pretty much exclusively secular, but elsewhere in the world, as Furienna points out, there are still important religious aspects associated with the day (or days) especially set aside for Remembrance of the Dead. I would imagine that someone living in Oklahoma (to pick a PURELY random example) would be familiar with Mexican observances of Dia de los Muertes.

But Howdy Doty is correct in that the Church hasn’t had nearly as much luck co-opting October 31st for their own purposes as they had with December 25, which the Romans celebrated as the Solstice-connected holiday Dies Natalis Solis Invictus, “The Birthday of the Unconquerable Sun.” Let’s see the pagan tree-hugging New Agers try to get THAT recognized as a federal holiday!

Is Berk Brethed now drawing Adam? He is looking more & more like Opus every day.