Halloween at Ordway
It’s that time of year again. The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting chillier, and the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is getting perilously thin. That’s what the ancient Celts believed, anyway. To them, this dangerous time of year – which they called Samhain (pronounced ‘Saa-wn’, and literally translated as ‘summer’s end’) – was the pivot-point between the light half of the year, concerned with planting and growing and harvesting, and the dark half, when the life-giving sun turned away from them, and life became frighteningly precarious. To protect themselves during this tense time, Celtic people held festivals of sacrifice, offering crops and animals to their gods in large communal bonfires. They often hid themselves from angry or vengeful spirits that might be moving across the veil – you can’t be too careful, after all – by dressing as spirits or animals, themselves. They also sought their own advantage: asking their priests – the Druids – to peer i