Happy Halloween

A celebration of our Scottish traditions.

Greetings, dear Sunny Buddies,

How are you this All Hallows Eve? 

I wonder if you have any spooky plans for today? Happy smile!

As you may well know, Halloween originates from the Celtic festival of Samhain. The celebration of this time acknowledges the movement from the harvest season to preparation for the coming Winter. In the image below, you can see the annual flow of these seasonal celebrations in an eight-partitioned wheel. I find it fascinating that so many traditions adopted eight-partitioned imagery. I have written about this in a post called Evolutionary Maps of Wholeness.

Image from ButtercupElffly

Walking on this beautiful, misty, rainy morning, I felt deeply connected to my Celtic roots. I do like being Scottish. We have a remarkable cultural heritage that I enjoy exploring. As with many indigenous cultures, our rural people lived attuned to the seasonal cycles.  I appreciate the inherent ease of letting the Earth's movements around the Sun be our guide. These connections enable me to feel time as more expansive and intuitive. It is as if each moment is emerging out of the evolutionary design and choreography of the Cosmos. Just lovely!

Scottish Halloween Traditions

Our Celtic festivals are often spoken of as being 'pagan' in origin, usually to mean not Christian or Jewish. Yet, the etymology of the word pagan is more about being 'rural' and 'of the country.' On 'All Hallows Eve,' the people thought that the boundaries between the physical and the spirit realms were more permeable than at other times. The people believed that the spirits of the dead would cross into the physical realm, which was rather scary for them.

Many Halloween traditions weave the celebrations of this harvest time with protection from evil spirits. And so, I thought I would have a little bit of fun and share some of the Scottish traditions around Halloween that I experienced as a child.

In Scotland, we called trick or treating Guisin'. 

The trick part required people to dress up in old clothes and darken their faces or wear a mask of some sort. The reason for this tradition was to disguise the children to avoid them being 'taken' by the evil spirits. 

The treat part comes from the elders of the village knocking on doors to collect food for the harvest feast. They also gathered offerings for the fairies to ensure the community's cattle survived the winter. 

I have great memories, as a child and then as a parent, of going out 'guising.' We would come back with additional pocket money, fruit and nuts, and, of course, loads of CHOCOLATE!

When I was a child, we would carve these lanterns out of turnips to create ghostly faces to ward off any evil spirits. Thankfully, turnips have been superseded by pumpkins, which are so much easier to carve. The lanterns often sit outside the front door of a house to indicate that ‘guisers’ are welcome.

Dookin' is a fantastic Scottish word. You place your hands behind your back and use your mouth to try and catch an apple floating in a basin of water. Sometimes, we would try dropping a fork held in our teeth in the hope of spearing one! It's not at all easy in either scenario. I remember us all looking at each other afterwards and laughing at all our wet faces and soaking hair.

We hung scones from a good height with string so that we could get underneath them. Then, with our hands behind our backs, we had to attempt to eat them. As you can imagine, this got very messy and rather sticky!

Questions for this Week

So there you go. It has been a delight to travel down memory lane with you this week. Wherever you are, I would love to know;

• What memories of Halloween traditions do you have?

• How and with whom will you celebrate Halloween this year?

As always, I love hearing from you.

Ann