Halloween has become a "retail-commercial" day generated by the American shopping conglomerates. Each year on the 31st October, children are encouraged to trick-n-treat and wear costumes featuring pumpkins resembling ghoulish heads.

Just like the non-Jesus theme of the modern celebration of Christmas as a retail- commercial day, Halloween also had its basis in true religious traditions. The Roman Emperor Constantine even moved Christ's birthday from the 14 April to 25th Dec to co-incide approximately with northern winter soltice. This year, celebrate Halloween as a bit more than just a shallow 'retail-commercial' day.

Halloween is really "All Hallow's Eve" or the Eve, or day just before, All Saints Day. More importantly, this day as the preparation day just before All Saints, All Hallows is more correctly anticipated as the Day of All Souls.

Not everyone who passes from earthly life from a current incarnation becomes a saint; but the suggestion that all people are inately (or, of their very core nature) a soul is what is celebrated on All Hallow's Eve. We 'hallow' or 'meditate upon' or 'deeply cogitate' or just 'deeply reflect' upon the 'souls' or 'spirits' of our ancestors, usually our own personal line of ancestors in a purposeful prayerful manner to both help them accede to God's kingdom, or return to earth or another place in the universe for a higher stepping stone incarnation, and to ask their intercession to assist us to advance in our earthly journeys.

Many Christian homes have a wall with photos of ancestors surrounding images or statues of Mother Mary and her sons Jesus and Thomas, along with perhaps a personal saint like St Gerard, St Mary McKillop. This is where the family of the home would gather to 'hallow' on All Soul's Eve. On this day, many Christians make special efforts to visit and decorate with floral tributes the graves of ancestors, where they pray. Indians and Chinese have similar shrines to their ancestors within a space of their home. The Vedic tradition of Indian would place this small space of about a square of the length of the distance from the writs to the elbow (say 280mm x 280mm) right in the very centre of the home, calling it the Brahmastan, in the centre of which their chief god, Brahma, would stand.

Halloween, like many religious events, originated long before the coming of Jesus. It was originally the Celtic harvest festival of Samhain. The Celts had many settlements throughout western Europe in the millenium prior to Christianity, not just Wales and Ireland. Their ideas and customs would have competed with the ideas of the numerous Jewish settlements throughout eastern Europe and even in southern India. We know more about the Jewish customs because they wrote the Old Testament and other histories, whereas most Celts did not read nor write.

Being on 31st October, this ancient pre-Christian Samhain harvest festival was past the end of the long European summer at about midway through the European autumn. This is when many of the annual fruits are at their ripest and biggest. One of the biggest fruits is, of course, the pumpkin. So the pumpkin, also a fruit for storage, was able to become the natural symbol of the harvest of fruit and vegetables needed to sustain the people over winter.

While the day is solumn for adults, let the children make the day joyous. There is joy in our elderly advancing to the afterlife. There is joy in our ancestors successes. Let the children make faces in the large pumpkins, celebrating the harvest with food to sustain us through the (northern) winter. Let them scoup out the pumpkins so they can have pumpkin helmets. The adults will make soups from the inards! Let the children play trick or treat in a friendly neighbourhood.

The children are meant to play an innocent type of trick or joke for the amusement of the neighbour, while the neighbour is meant to have a treat, like chocolate or a biscuit, for the children. The word trick is not meant to indicate doing something of a harmful or wrong nature, but rather doing something novel or clever. For instance the child might do an acrobatic jump, sing a song, play a trumpet, do a magic trick, do a card trick or recite a poem.

Remembering the long departed, as opposed to recently departed, does allow a certain amount of fun. Halloween, being an eve rather than a day event, looks to symbols of the night and of the twilight - that period of half an hour in Queensland between the sunset and the onset of dark; but more of an hour in the more southern latitude of Melbourne; and even approaching two hours south of Hobart and in Edinburgh in Scotland within the northern latitudes. This twilight, or eve, is the time for black cats, bats, spiders and more nebulous creatures like ghosts, skeletons, witches and wizards!

Enjoy Halloween, as a custom for both the night of the souls, and the completion of the harvest. There is little need to make it just another 'commercial day'. Then celebrate the following day, 1st of November, All Saints Day, by visiting the religious place of your favourite saint.

Gerry Clarke
Pocket Books.