Here we are again this weekend, on our National Holiday of Candy, Children, and Death. Which is a confusing mixture, almost as much as as the National Festival of Rebirth, Snow, and Materialism. Also, skeletons and spiders are scary, but not as frightening as a man coming down your chimney who's also following you in his magic snow-scope all year, detecting when you're Bad.
No, there actually is a point to it all, beyond our weird habit of ingesting the folklore of ancient peoples and making them available at Walmart. As the days shorten and the leaves flame and then fall in northern lands, October has always seemed psychologically the right time for a day to deal with the dead.
The church, in its liturgical way, meant for All Souls day to be all serious business and fasting and prayer for sinning souls, but the popular folk of Europe in their more literal mode said "hey, all this calling upon the names of all the dead and stuff . . . isn't that a little effed up and scary?"
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