Oidche Shamhna / Halloween

A very wet and windy morning when I should probably have worn wet weather walking kit to the supermarket but that always feels a bit excessive given the short distance. The route via the White Cart Water presented one heron, zero kingfishers and an array of huddled up mallards.
I don’t normally post my daily blipfoto on Facebook but I am today to demonstrate to D, M and S that, yes, I have successfully completed my traditional Scottish turnip lantern. Unlike pumpkins which are a cinch to carve neeps are less yielding. I have just discovered from a link on the Scottish Gaelic Duolingo fb page that if you whole boil them first it makes it much easier to scope out the flesh, but it’s a bit late now and I probably won’t be doing this again next year. In the end I used a teaspoon which took for ever, so by the time it was hollow (and we had had mashed turnip three nights in row) the skin was soft and dead easy to carve. The ghosts, acrylic painted sycamore leaves, are thanks to an idea from the Stornoway Gazette.
It’s well known that Halloween has evolved from the Celtic New year. The Celtic year is divided into a light half – Beltane beginning on 1 May and a dark half Shamha beginning on 1 November. Tonight is when the veil between our world and the world of spirits is at its thinnest, when spirts and humans were able to pass through the threshold with spirits returning to visiting their kin.
(I can sense another literary connection coming on - The Painted Veil, and because there is a cholera epidemic involved it feels like another novel for covid times. I probably need to get out more, in due course).
What’s less well known (thanks to Inspires Online) is that today (for some) is Reformation Day - Martin Luther posted his Theses on the eve of All Hallows knowing that the following day – All Saints, everyone would see it, in modern jargon it went viral.
I wonder if there isn’t a nostalgia market for ‘burning turnip’ smelling candles? I would buy one.
And news just in… RIP Sean Connery.