Halloween ‘is our New Year’s Eve’

For some Haligonians, the spiritual trumps the spooky

Rhonda Haley-McKinnon is a Wiccan and says that Halloween is an important celebration for people who share her beliefs.

Sarah King

sarahking@dal.ca

Halloween is widely considered a secular holiday for kids to dress up in silly costumes and consume copious amounts of candy.

But for some it has a deeper meaning.

Rhonda Haley-McKinnon celebrates Halloween in a different way. Haley-McKinnon is Wiccan and she describes Wicca as an Earth-based religion that falls “under the pagan umbrella.” To her, Halloween is a religious holiday.

“It is our New Year’s Eve.”

Halloween has its roots in Samhain (pronounced SOW-an), an ancient Celtic festival held for three days on the November full moon. Celtic people believed that Samhain was the time between one year and the next, when the veil between this world and the spirit world was thinnest.

Despite what has become associated with the holiday, it was not a time of fear or evil. Faiths that stem from ancient Celtic traditions, such as Wicca, Druidism and Shamanism, recognize Samhain as a time of celebration, rest and looking forward to the coming year.

Haley-McKinnon says there’s nothing scary about it.

“For us it’s a celebration,” she said.

She and her husband, who she says is “more pagan-friendly than pagan,” have no plans for Oct. 31 because they will be working.

Haley-McKinnon owns a store called Morrigan LeFay’s Mystical Gifts in Dartmouth that sells vampire and Wiccan items. The store will celebrate the holiday and its one-year anniversary with an all-day sale. She says business picks up this time of year, even though she mainly sells décor and not costumes.

She will also be celebrating an anniversary of a different kind — her wedding. She and her husband decided to get married on Halloween because of its religious nature.

“It’s about being connected to your family,” she said, “so the family that had passed away and wouldn’t be able to attend the wedding would still be there.”

Cliff Seruntine, a psychologist living just outside of Halifax, doesn’t see the season as spooky either. Seruntine practices a faith based on traditional Celtic folklore and he too associates only happy things with the holiday.

“It’s actually a shame that it’s become so associated with horror and terrible things,” he said.

He says traditionally the Samhain ritual is “very warm and beautiful,” a time to be courteous to the living and the dead.

He feels today’s Halloween is “a little bit of a bastardization” of the original religious holiday.

Traditional Samhain rituals include the gathering of friends, family and community around a bonfire at the end of the harvest season. Crops are offered to the fire as a sacrifice to bring a good harvest in the new year.

Everyone present then lights their hearth fire with flames from the bonfire to symbolize the unifying of the community.

Other rituals include inviting spirits of ancestors to join the ceremony, honouring specific deities and eating traditional food such as colcannon, a traditional Irish potato dish, soul cakes and ha’penny cakes.

Modern Halloween practices stem from misconstrued traditions of Samhain. Adults and children alike would dress up in costumes for fun, and to prevent evil spirits from recognizing them when their worlds were so close, Seruntine explains.

Jack-o’-lanterns came from the tradition of carving faces in turnips to ward off the bad spirits and welcome the good ones.

Trick-or-treating is reminiscent of the ha’penny cakes given to children and the excess food set out for deceased relatives and visiting spirits.

With all this talk of spirits and the dead, Samhain was not about wickedness. Seruntine laughs at the notion that pagans worship the devil on Halloween.

“You have to be Christian or Jewish or Muslim to have a devil,” he said. “We don’t worship one.”

Seruntine observes Samhain in his home in Twa Corbies Hollow, a community for learning about the pagan faiths and living closer to nature.

On Oct. 31 he says there will be a gathering of about 10 adults and their children around a fire. They will tell stories and eat traditional food.

In November, when the actual Samhain festival would take place, Seruntine will take part in a personal ritual and go into the woods for three days for meditation and spiritual guidance.

He says the commercialization of the holiday is a shame and a mockery of what it is really about.

“It’s the same as making fun of the Japanese for their Shinto religion where they honour their ancestors, or any other religion, by twisting its truths into something it was never meant to be.”

Michael Van Den Hoek, a member of the defunct Dalhousie Pagan Society, admits that the truth behind the Halloween tradition has been skewed, but he feels it is no worse than other religious holidays.

He says commercialization has taken the religion out of the holidays of many faiths, such as Christmas, and Halloween is no exception.

Van Den Hoek is a Druid, one of the main religions of the ancient Celts, and celebrates Samhain both traditionally and in a contemporary sense.

In previous years the society held a ceremony on Oct. 31. It involved gathering around a fire for a New Year’s resolution-type ritual, where members would write down an aspect of their lives they wanted to change and throw the paper into the fire.

The ceremony will not take place this year – the society disbanded due to low turn out. Executive and dedicated members have graduated, leaving few people to hold meetings.

“We haven’t had a lot of fresh blood,” Van Den Hoek said.

So this year’s celebration will include a pumpkin-carving session held by a pagan society in the city, followed by the annual pagan ritual on the Common.

Van Den Hoek says he doesn’t mind combining traditional practices with the more commercial aspects of Halloween. He always dressed up and went trick-or-treating as a child and continued to do so after his conversion to Druidism.

“Who doesn’t want free candy, right?” he said.  “Last year after our ritual we still stopped at a couple houses and a few older couples good-naturedly still gave us candy, so it was a lot of fun.”