The Best Holiday Season
Everyone talks about the “holiday season” in reference to the winter holidays: Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, New Years Eve, Solstice…
The holiday season that gets swept aside is – in my opinion – the best one of the year.
Fall holidays are my favorite, and they all have beautiful meanings that go beyond getting candy or playing dress up. Over the next week we’ll see Halloween, Dia De Los Muertos, and Samhain. All of which are celebrated around the same few days, and are so important to me personally. We’ve already passed all of the fall holidays that the Jewish religion celebrates (of which there are several), and the Hindu celebration Diwali is coming up next month. And those are just a few of the myriad fall holidays people celebrate.
If you’ve never looked into the history of whatever fall celebrations your family has, I urge you to do so. You’re guaranteed to learn something new, and it might help you find some new traditions you can weave into your celebrations to help them be extra special.
I grew up celebrating Halloween in a big way.
My younger years were spent in a college town while my mom was studying to become a teacher. While there, we developed a community of other young families in our apartment complex. Every year for Halloween my mom would make a huge pot of homemade chili, a tray of cornbread, and a ton of hot dogs and our entire apartment complex would get together and have a feast. Then we would all go out in our awesome costumes that our moms painstakingly created in between their jobs and their studies, and we would go trick-or-treating on campus. This may sound strange, but believe it or not the college dorms had some of the best spooky setups and great candy for all of us kids.
When we moved to the Tri-Cities, my mom kept the tradition alive and to this day my family still goes over for chili and hot dogs followed by trick-or-treating.
Dia De Los Muertos is a holiday that I didn’t celebrate growing up, but as I’ve gotten older and learned more about my Mexican heritage I’ve begun to incorporate the celebration into my family’s world. This year we even made an altar to honor our relatives who have passed. I’m excited to instill this tradition in my daughter and give her a tiny piece of our heritage that means something so huge. There are so many family members I wish she could have gotten to know better, but they passed before she was old enough to create real memories with. This gives me a chance to share some of my own memories in a way that helps her feel connected to them.
The most recent fall holiday that I’ve come to know and love is Samhain. It’s origins are Irish and it was originally celebrated to welcome in the fall harvest and the changing of the seasons. Like Halloween and Dia De Los Muertos, it’s also a celebration of the veil between the living and the dead being thinnest. There are a ton of cryptid/monster like creatures associated with the holiday, and so many celebratory traditions. But, like everything they don’t understand, Christian leaders tried to turn it into a Christian holiday which eventually turned into the Halloween holiday we know and celebrate today. The reason Samhain is so relevant to me is that as Wicca and witchcraft has gotten more prevalent the holiday has begun to be more widely celebrated. Which I adore.
So what holidays do you celebrate in the fall? Do you know the origins of your chosen celebrations? Do you honor the dead on these days? I’d love to know!
