In the earth's locales where Mardi Gras or carnivale is still practiced, on the other side of the calendar is a Day of the Dead, during which living families inhabit cemeteries for the chance to interact with their dead relatives.
If you were in Lousiana yesterday, you might find yourself slapping a fresh coat of paint on a family crypty, and decorating it with fresh flowers. Or if you lived in Oaxaca, Mexico, you might partake in the night long dias los muertos celebration with symbolic, and often hilarious, skeletal carvings, and skull marzipan, which culminates in a party in the graveyard.
Here, Halloween has become a ridiculously commercial holiday, but it still has some of the earmarks of the original Celtic harvest festival samhain. Instead of carving turnips, we use new world pumpkins. And we still dress in costume to ward off the spirits, for whom Halloween is an open door to the other side.
In our little downtown neighborhood, a tradition began four years ago when kids began to appear in families, and, to be frank, we wanted them to collect enough candy for the entire family to eat.
It's grown so that almost twenty families walk up and down Pearl Street, until we end at the home of Ran
i Arbo and Scott Kessel, were we gather around a small bonfire, eat seasonal snacks like apples and Cheetos, and ward off the cold with a sip of bourbon. For the past few years, Wesleyan students in the neighborhood have joined us to seranade the group with old songs on old instruments.
There was some festive neighborhood activity in the Loveland/Oak/High St. area as well. A couple of butternut squashes purchased from the last of this year's farmers markets on the Green was transformed into a fabulous soup. It was the preferred orange food of evening, after Reese's cups (not really orange)and cantaloupe.
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