This Sunday is our annual All Hallow's Eve party! As has been our tradition, children in our youngest classes rotate by class to different activities: games, stories, crafts and food. This year our 6th and 7th grade class asked to lead an activity for the children in their classroom.
As I have already written about here, as a liberal religion, we are very deliberate about how we celebrate and share together in celebration. Halloween is a cultural holiday in the United States. Where the candy that many of us hand out comes from is problematic because it involves child slavery in attaining the raw ingredients.
In pagan celebrations going back many, many years, Halloween, Samhain to the Celts, is an agricultural festival. It is a time when the veil between the living and dead is the thinnest. It is a time to honor our ancestors. Making an Ancestor Altar would be both appropriate to this holiday and important in acknowledging and discussing these big questions about life and death. We are all here only because of those who have come before us. An excellent resource on this holiday and other that I have found is Waverly Fitzgerald's, e-magazine, Living in Season.
