A very happy Samhain!

November 1, 2024August 20, 2025 Leave a comment

Despite popular depictions of Samhain/Halloween, it’s not really a major holiday for me in a religious sense. It’s more or less New Year’s. There are some events here and there — workshops on ancestor veneration, dumb suppers, and such — but it’s not quite as big for me as the solstices and equinoxes are (especially Mabon).

This year, we had tentative plans to have dinner and watch movies with friends, but that fell through. Instead, it was handing out candy to trick-or-treaters, doing small, homey things, and holding a spirit feast.

Samhain Spirit Feasts versus Dumb Suppers

Elegant dinner table with floral centerpiece — Photo by Alina Skazka on Pexels.com

Dumb suppers are a traditional way to celebrate Samhain and involve sharing a meal in silence with the ancestors. Spirit feasts are a bit different — they’re not necessarily silent, and there are a lot more invitations to go around.

Dumb suppers tap into a kind of sacred silence that’s part mourning, part veneration, part listening and being receptive. The intention is to pay attention to the spirits of the ancestors, rather than the noise of living beings. Sometimes, people use this as a time for divination by listening for the voices of the dead.

Close up photograph of two lit sticks of incense. — Photo by Abhas Jaiswal on Pexels.com

When I conduct a spirit feast, on the other hand, it’s more like a party. Deities, spirits of nature, spirits to whom I may owe a debt, and spirits of ancestors (blood-related or otherwise) are all invited. I may offer food (this year, for example was fresh-baked biscuits with peach honey butter). I usually also offer incense, candles, liquor, tea, flowers, honey, and/or perfume. I play music (usually the lyre or dulcimer guitar). I read poetry. I tell stories or jokes. I put new artwork on my altar.

The atmosphere and focus are a bit different. It’s less about communing with the dead, and more about offering the best of what I have to all of the people, animals, plants, elements, places, and gods that have made me who I am.

I do this year-round, but Samhain makes it a bit more special.
Plus, it’s easier for everyone to attend.

Getting Ready for the Winter Months

This year, I’m honestly looking forward to winter. I have a lot of small-scale stuff to do to prepare for spring and summer, and I’m excited to get to it. I have art to make, wood to prepare for wands, trees to prune, and areas of the garden to set up for vegetable and herb beds. Honestly, I’m almost more eager to do that than I am to see the payoff later on.

I’ve built up a pretty good stock of art, wands, and jewelry. I’m starting to study incense making and botanical perfumery. I’m super stoked to find actual markets to vend at next year, so I can expand beyond just selling things online. It’s a little scary, but even more exciting.

No matter whether you celebrate Samhain or not, here’s hoping all of you have had a peaceful, happy October 31st and are looking forward to the months ahead!

life · Neodruidry

Happy Samhain!

October 31, 2023October 30, 2023 J.2 Comments

It’s New Year. Halloween. Samhain. Whatever you want to call it, it’s when the “veil is at its thinnest,” children ignore everything they’ve been told about not taking candy from strangers, and the leaves are at their peak here.

This year, I’ll be celebrating Samhain with other Neodruids for the first time. That’s not all, though — after our ill-fated trip to the caverns, my Handsome Assistant and I decided to go somewhere that was the complete antithesis of a cave.

The mountains.

An image of a nearly-full moon rising over the Shenandoah mountains. The sky is shades of deep pink, blue, and lavender.

We took a road trip down Skyline drive to go leaf snarping. It was unseasonably warm, but the elevation made it quite a bit cooler. The leaves were brilliant, and the air was full of the earthy, musky, spicy-sweet smell of decomposing foliage. The strange bit of warm weather we’ve had meant that there were still some wildflowers clinging to life, bringing even more color to the already-saturated landscape. It was near sunset, so the nearly-full moon was shining just above a bank of bright pink clouds. The landscape looked like a Klee painting, the sky was a vaporwave album, and the air was filled with a smell a perfumer could only dream of replicating.

The moon peeking over a cloud bank at sunset. Below, there's a view of the mountains covered in trees in brilliant shades of red, orange, and gold.

It was pretty nice. Especially after the cave incident.

My Handsome Assistant teased me gently for taking tiny pictures. Snaps of an individual leaf, or a really interesting piece of lichen. I do that a lot. The larger landscape is fascinating, but the way the sun seemed to melt through the spaces in the trees backlit the leaves and made them glow like flames.

I took a special research elective in high school, where we had to report on abstracts of other research studies, then formulate our own. My teacher remarked that I mostly seemed interested in the extremely macro and micro — either the far reaches of distant galaxies, or the inner workings of organelles. Not so much the stuff in between.

(My experiment was about teaching hamsters to differentiate between different symbols and was in no way a way to get the school to pay for me to have several hamsters and hamster supplies, I promise.)

I feel like this is still reflected in the kind of pictures I take and the things I paint. I like to focus closely on a small individual subject, or on a very large landscape. It is also why I think I get so bored by portraits or character reference sheets.

A road curves around a hill and into a forest filled with orange, red, and green trees. Some boulders stud the hillside in the foreground.

Today, I’m making some roasted vegetables to share at a potluck. (And possibly some bread — I’ve been slacking on baking lately — or lentil pasta in pumpkin cream sauce.)

This Samhain, I’m also focusing on all of the rad things I want to do next year. Stuff’s winding down, but it’s still warm enough to be active. I’m also filled with creative energy right now, so it’s time to plan, save, and sow for spring. My Handsome Assistant and I just planted a plum tree (surrounded with some bulbs, for the bare beginnings of a tree guild), black raspberries, and swamp milkweed before the ground gets too cold to dig. We still need to prune the apples and get everyone else ready for winter, but we’re well on our way to a happy and fruitful spring and summer.

Here’s hoping all of you can get out to do some leaf snarping of your own and have a very good Samhain.

life · Neodruidry · Witchcraft

A Soggy Samhain

November 2, 2020November 1, 2020 J.Leave a comment

It was cold and rainy here over the weekend, though that was fine by me — we weren’t exactly spoiled for choice when it came to bonfires and dumb suppers this year. Besides, though rainy weather does my brainmeat up all wretched, it does make me want to clean and air everything out.

So cleaning, cleansing, and refreshing all of my wards is exactly what I did. I would have refreshed my altar too, but I did that on the last new moon — dusting it, wiping it down with a special blend of oils, herbs, and flower water, burning more herbs in my hearth-cauldron, lighting candles, the whole bit.

I often like to take all of the herbs that are getting to be past their peak, ones that I’ve had lingering in my herb jars, drawers, and cabinets for a bit too long, and burn them on Samhain. It just feels right to burn the old herbs, thank them for their usefulness, and either save the ashes (depending on the herbs) for black salt or return them to the soil. I didn’t get to do that this year, but that’s okay — I don’t really have a big stash of old herbs anyhow.

I also filtered the oil I’d started on October’s first full moon, which gave me an inexplicable craving for pizza (courtesy of all of the dittany of Crete. That stuff smells delicious). Now I’ve got a neat little bottle of fresh raven oil chilling in my secret stash, which makes me pretty happy. I’d love to be able to work this combination of herbs into another form — incense, maybe — but many of them are the type that just tends to be throat-pluggingly smoky and bitter when they’re burned. They might work alright if they’re in small amounts and sufficiently worked into a sweeter-smelling base, but that’ll take a little experimentation.

This month came with its usual compliment of especially vivid dreams and messages, but I won’t bore you with those details. I hope the feeling lasts, though. I’m always at least a little sad to see them go once the veil’s no longer as thin.

So how was everyone else’s holiday?