Raising armies of the dead near you this Sunday….

Yeah so there’s this thing coming up. In many cultures the end of the year, also known as autumn is the best time to think about death. This is not weird since the whole world seems to be dying, well plant life at least, to prepare for winter and resurrection in spring. With the daylight hours lessening every day gloom and doom and depression precedes the seasonal cheer in December. So we are all programmed to think about death, the deceased, poverty and general misery. So what do we humans do, we balance it out, make it a celebration of it and try to make a buck in the process.

Don’t get me wrong I love Halloween and Samhain, but I can clearly see it’s main motivation in our modern times. Dress up as slutty as possible (love that!), decorate your home as if it is a gothic Christmas (love that too!) and distribute candy among the diabetic and obese. Here in the Netherlands we celebrate (on some parts of the country) St Maarten on 11 november. Kids go sort of trick or treating but not dressed up and they carry an often self made lantern called a lampion, they do not yell “trick or treat” however, they sing St Maarten songs, usually off key and annoyingly loud. Now St Maarten was the patron saint of the poor, having very little himself he shared whatever he had with the less fortunate. So to celebrate this guy we send our kids out in the neighborhood to beg for candy.

Though there is actually a Christian celebration at the root of Halloween, the celebration we in the western world know and love these days is closer to Samhain, the Pagan party at the end of the year, celebrating the last harvest. Since the people in yesteryear thought it a good idea to do some partying when nature was losing the fight against winter, the specific time of the year became important. Now the whole world was slowly rotting away around this time of year, those people… I’m picturing tribes of Celts, druids and women clothed in little more then fur bikini’s here, reckoned that this would be the time the veil between our world and the next was thinnest. This kinda stuck and many good horror movies followed. The “latin” Dia de los Muertos is the awesome example of how to do this right, go to your loved ones’ graves and celebrate their lives, invite them over for dinner and be happy for who they were.

To celebrate this myself I will do a special Tarot marathon type thingy tomorrow. From 12:00 till 17:00 I will be doing readings with an extra Halloween flavor added to the mix. I guess we will find out how thin this veil to the other world is. Sunday I will thank my ghost cat for saving my life and after doing some cleaning up around the house I will hopefully do little more than relax, play Star Wars the Force Unleashed 2 and watch porn on the internet. A happy coincidence, daylight saving hours are starting Sunday so Samhain this year will last 25 hours so if there’s dark Druids, mystic necromancers and evil sorcerers out there getting ready to raise armies of the dead to take over the world, this Sunday would be a good date to plan such an occasion.