Celebrating the origins of the pre-Christian Samhain festival we refer to as Halloween today, feels like discovery in so many ways. Since the early 1990s, this event and its beginnings have been attended by a number of participants eager to learn and contribute to the knowledge all of us present thought we knew. Since 2016 the group of women known as Nollaig na mBan NY have taken on the organizing, alongside the other ancient Celtic Fire Festivals of Imbolg, Bealtaine and Lughnasa, which mark the cycles of beginnings and endings, light and dark, growth and harvest in the ancient Coligny calendar of Ireland. The founder of all these events in New York was Maura Mulligan, recently returned to her native Mayo after 67 years in America, leaving her own legends in New York — and likely starting new ones!
Bonfires are a common theme in these festivals, light and dark dominated the year, and all the attendees this year symbolically carried a torch to the traditions of the past as well as lighting the way forward. Meeting on Nov. 2, the eve of an election, felt especially meaningful as we embraced a theme of memory. Concluding every Samhain gathering was a Ceremony of Lights/An Searmanas Solas, whereby participants mentioned the names of people close to them who had passed into the next world with the past year. Holding a light in moments of quiet paid homage to their role in our own lives, so this year we focused on adding some words of our own about their influence that lives on in us. Stories and mementos memorializing the departed were shared as we enjoyed a splendid dinner menu at Connolly’s Pub and Restaurant on East 47th Street.
Allisoun Price made a spectacular entrance as a pumpkin, carrying a tray of carved turnips and representing a serious commitment to sculptors everywhere because turnips are notoriously hard to cut. Emigrants discovering the much softer pumpkin were happy to relinquish tradition for ease in this endeavor! Mary McIntyre welcomed the gathering and Nancy Oda gave us some interesting history. Two thousand years ago, Druids celebrated the harvest’s end and the earth resting . This transition from light to dark thinned the delicate veil between the spiritual and real worlds enabling ghosts and spirits to freely pass through. Turnips were carved in windows to deter evil spirits, all household fires were extinguished and a village bonfire lit instead. Embers from the fire were taken home to relight fires there. Food and drink was prepared to welcome friendly ancestors, but traveling outside required disguises to hide from spirits intending harm.
The Catholic church, alarmed by the current of implicit beliefs and practices incompatible with religious tenets, embraced All Soul’s (‘Hallows) Day on Nov. 1 such that Oct. 31 could be All Hallows Eve or Hallow E’en/Halloween.
Mary McIntyre told us about her beloved cousin Patricia, who regularly sent American clothes to Mary and her family in Ireland. A Coney Island hospital nurse, she was a hard worker and fount of health knowledge for her family. A silver bracelet from Patricia was given to Mary on her 50th birthday and reminds Mary of the fond regard for this woman.
Bernadette Cullen shared her Covid-era New York Public Library Zoom reading group attempting James Joyce’s “Ulysses” with those familiar, and unfamiliar, with this challenging work. Still meeting, hailing from Canada, Korea and the U.S., they have since read “Dubliners” and “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”
Reader Kevin Wright told the group that Druids believed the calendar was a circle with a weak spot between the beginnings and ends where time stops, and all eras mix. Bernadette was inspired to write “Souls and Clouds,” verses where she imagines clouds, those shape-shifters, herding souls into an hourglass:
When time’s circle reaches end to almost end
Turn the hourglass upside down
And spill those souls
without name or prayer or face remembered
into time’s whisper of a closing crack.
Vincent Simpson followed with a heartfelt description of his brother-in-law who unexpectedly passed, leaving memories of how a good father, husband and grandfather becomes a role model inspiring those lives he touched. Few of us realize how wide our own net is cast.
Marie Bridget Dundon recalled the influence music had on her own family through her Uncle and her brother, Bill. She beautifully recited W.B. Yeats’s “Fiddler of Dooney.
Nancy Oda remembered her father on the 25th anniversary of his death. As a U.S. soldier sent to Japan after WW11 as a translator under General MacArthur’s reconstruction, his later efforts to join a union in Chicago were unsuccessful given the conservative thinking about his Japanese ancestry.
This author shared photographs of a lifelong friend, her unselfish nature and humor in unexpected places. I helped successfully deliver her second daughter, unexpectedly born at home, tempering my panic with her relief at my presence. News of her terminal illness was shared with her best friends only after she had heard all of our activities first.
A brief description of Samhain was read in Irish and in English by all participants as we formed a circle, each holding a candle and naming each departed person. A moment of silence concluded the evening and, always with some reluctance, we prepared to leave. In his recent “Between the Lines” article in the Irish Echo, Peter McDermott recalls the relatively new explosion of festivities now associated with Halloween in Ireland. Imagine the final day of the 1934 World's Fair, where, falling on Oct. 31, some 300,000 revelers, many masked as witches, took over control of 32 miles of streets and concessions. This year Halloween coincided with the ending of daylight saving time, where the only crowd control issue was the realization that many post-party New York revelers at Grand Central Terminal discovered they had missed their train, convinced they had encountered a time warp according to NYPD officers I asked on my own travels. Back home without incident, we carried our own “ember” from a smaller but no less enthusiastic Samhain where light, words, music and memories swirled contentedly.
