Hannah Chapman

Just a few days to go until Halloween; the first of the food holidays. The stores have been stocked with trick or treat candy since Labor Day. I have fallen for that trap before - buy treats for the kiddos in early October, then again the next week and again the next because the candy keeps getting eaten up. The past 2 years I got wiser and don't buy the Halloween candy until less than 5 days to go. (That's not as smart as it sounds since we have not had a single trick or treater since we moved into this house in the woods 4 years ago!) (READ MORE)

There's something to be said about Hallowe'en candy, and that is, that of it which I remember was largely crap.

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"Trick or Treat" came early this year.

Perhaps I should clarify. While Saturday, October 29 was the designated day for many children's Hallowe'en-themed activities — including costume contests, mall Trick-or-Treats, and the costumed American Diabetes Association Step Out to STOP Diabetes Walk, Mother Nature had other plans for us — plans that included snow shovels, flashlights, streets full of wet, slushy, ice-snow, and not a microwatt of electric power to be had for three towns' radius around us.

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Hallowe'en is a time of transformations.

In the ancient Celtic traditions (and the modern Wiccan ones), Samhain is the time at which the Goddess — old, and lonely, and missing her lover — goes to the Summerland to be with him. With her goes light and warmth, fertility, and life. The Samhain Sabbat denotes the end of summer/fall and the beginning of the winter seasons, a time when the last harvest has come in and when the herds are pared down to what the community can feed through the winter, and what will be able to reproduce in the spring.

It is a time of plenty, preceding a known time of famine.

It is also the start of the new year.

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