I was going to write a post for this year's Halloween season ranting about what I call the neo-pagans and their silliness. But I was half way through when I realized my heart wasn't really into it anymore. They aren't doing any serious harm to anyone, and some of them even have their hearts in the right place, so why pick on them.

Instead I thought I'd talk about how my wife and I have taken to celebrating Halloween and our reasons for what we do. Than everyone can make fun of us.

Neither of us adheres to any strict code of conduct as advocated by any one culture, although I tend towards walking a red road. (The term is take from the expression walking the good red road in reference to the colour assigned by the Sioux peoples to represent one of the four cardinal directions: the south. To walk the road from the south is to walk in faith. Natives use it to describe non-natives who following the practices of any of the native cultures)

There is a long tradition of celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next in the fall months. The Jewish new year Rosh Hashanah falls within our calendar months of September and October, and most agricultural based cultures would mark the end of the year by the final harvest.

Quite a number of older cultures have always viewed the three day period of October 31st to November 2nd as not only the end of the year, but a time to remember ones dead. The Celtic celebration of Samhain, the Iroquois Feast for the Dead, and even the Catholic Day Of The Dead celebrations in North America came from ancient Aztec celebrations worshiping their ancestors.

Ten years ago my wife's best friend decided to let go of her life. She had been dieing the long slow death of Multiple Sclerosis and had wasted away to the point where she could no longer feed herself. When she had still been able to talk she had insisted that she did not want a feeding tube, and had asked my wife to insure this was carried out. She died on Halloween, which had also been her birthday.

Halloween had been one of wife's favourite holidays, with all the fun of dressing up and playing, but with the death of her friend on that day it was harder to find reasons to be silly. What she decided to do was to re-invent the holiday so that it became something special to her, so that she could reclaim it from the unhappy memories she associated with it.

It seems to be a common problem for people; holidays evoking bad memories or triggering off emotional responses. For some awful reason Kingston and the surrounding areas seems to have been the home to a circle of ritual abusers. One person who we had been close to for a time had been so badly damaged emotionally that she had developed forty-one personalities.