Lighting A Candle

Besides putting our clocks back to winter time this weekend, we’re also entering a time of year that I always find heavy – and confusing.

I think I pretty much explained the why’s of my heavy feeling last year in a post entitled The Dreary Misery of Halloween.

The confusion, to do with dates, did not really come into it last year because then the dates kind of fell into place by themselves. This year they don’t.

We have two All Saints days in our calendar, and on top of that an All Souls day. The original All Saints was 1 November. Nowadays Swedish All Saints Day falls on the Saturday immediately preceding All Souls Day, which is the first Sunday in November. However, 1st November is still also marked All Saints Day in the calendar, whatever day of the week that may happen to be.

I’m telling you this because it means that while in most countries Halloween has just been celebrated, in Sweden Halloween/All Saints is not until next weekend.

Since the American kind of scary parties and trick-and-treating etc do not really belong in our old traditions – even if picked up by some people in later years though the influence of TV etc – that just adds to the confusion. Internationally tuned people might have celebrated Halloween during the weekend past, while others wait until next weekend.

I have no idea so far what I’ll be doing next weekend. But today at twilight I did what I wrote last year that I might do if I was on my own: I went to an old family grave in the cemetery closest to where I live, and lit a “symbolic” candle there. Turned out that someone else had already also done so, and that felt kind of nice.