A slow Samhain

Carving pumpkins and our own traditions

As soon as spooky things started to appear on supermarket shelves, my almost 3 year old loudly declared “I don’t like Halloween mummy”. Me neither kid. My delicate nervous system cannot handle being scared for fun! So this year I decided to do things a little differently, to be more in alignment with my values and create some new family traditions.

For a while now, I have been deepening my awareness of the Pagan Wheel of the Year so I told my daughter we were celebrating Samhain, rather than Halloween, which seemed to ease her worrisome mind (she is most empathic and emotionally aware little person I’ve ever met, which is both beautiful and hard at times because I want to protect her innocent heart).

Planning ahead is not my strong suit but part of living with more intention means making preparations and giving thought to what I’d like to create. I find using the Wheel of Year has been a wonderful anchor point, mostly by bringing a subtle theme to our days and giving me inspiration of fun things for us to do together.

Here is what a slow Samhain season looked like for us;

• We created an Autumn altar space and added photos of my grandparents, who I lost this past year. We lit a candle for them and also talked about them, to keep their memory alive

• We went to a subtle Halloween-themed play date in space that she loves, because it’s small and not too overwhelming for her

• Now she is old enough to get involved, we picked and carved our pumpkins together

• We made ‘soul cakes’ to hand out instead of sweets and chocolate. I read about this tradition in a beautiful post by Victoria Harrison which you can find here. (Lesson for next year, do not use raisins because the dog will steal at least one!)

• We went for a walk to spot pumpkin lanterns instead of dressing up and going trick or treating (although now she has realised you get sweets for knocking on doors, she has been asking to go trick or treating every evening since!)

• And we invited some friends over for a witchy play date and made love-infused potions

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[A little reality insight: my energy levels are pretty low right now (who’s aren’t!?) so whilst I did have the best intentions for our activities, most of them included me getting a bit snappy at the mess, exhausted from the extra cleaning up and not leaving enough space for me to tend to my own heart during this sensitive time whilst grieving my grandparents. BUT I’m reminding myself that what’s important is my intention behind it all and I am (trying) not to beat myself up because I know (I hope) my daughter had fun]