October is always 31 days, but it felt long this year.  That’s probably because the month started on a Thursday, yielding five spooky weekends.  The arrangements of days, along with the generally beautiful weather around here, gave a nice, long run-up to Halloween.  I do take holidays seriously.  The unrelenting nature of work exhausts me—making it all electronic all the time seems to’ve sucked any joy from it.  October is the time to be outside when the weather is fine.  It’s a season to bathe in falling leaves, shuffling through their dried skeletons on the ground.  Breathing deeply and knowing that winter is just around the bend.  In the pagan European reckoning of seasons, winter begins in November and spring starts in February.  Halloween is a hinge-point, a transition between harvest and hunkering down.  A hinge-point where the impossible becomes possible for a day.

Halloween didn’t begin in America, but in a sense it did.  The holiday we’ve exported (without tariffs) has taken root in many places throughout the world.  It’s a time of celebration that makes certain sects of Christians nervous while other sects find it spiritual.  I remember dressing up as a vampire in college.  I’d finally had a nice cape that my mother sewed, I’d discovered pancake make-up by virtue of being in a clown ministry, but I still had to rely on those plastic fangs that were more fit for a werewolf than my brand of the undead.  I went to the sanctioned Halloween party at Grove City College only to have my friends from the clown group ask me why I was celebrating the demonic.    I wasn’t, of course.  I was simply celebrating what I knew even then was a spiritual occasion.

Changes come for us, whether welcome or not.  Halloween is a day of transitions.  We’ve lost part of that by declaring winter doesn’t begin until the old Midwinter at the solstice.  The equinox is a month and a half behind us now.  Old World autumn began in August.  Our time-keeping may have changed, but Halloween retains its position as a point when things change.  The spooky season’s just getting started, however.  All Soul’s Day is Monday and Christmas was the traditional time for telling ghost stories.  Halloween has it’s Headless Horseman, of course, prompting me to leave the final words in this post to a blessing I received from someone who didn’t know I’d written a book on the subject: “May your horseman be headless and not apocalyptic.”