Month: October 2024

Old Halloween…..New Halloween

As a cradle catholic I understood the feast days of All Souls and following All Saints Day. What I understood was that meant two “extra” masses in addition to Sunday mass in a short seven day week! I always assumed the extra masses were meant to keep children in line gluten with thoughts of massive amounts of candy.

When I was 20 I had the privilege of traveling to Mexico the week of Halloween and I have never enjoyed the holiday more. The people walking to the cemetery in a quiet but gay line as they talked to each other in lowered voices with smiles on their faces and bright boquets of flowers, food, trinkets, and wrapped packages for their loved ones laid to rest.

This was done in such a festive and proud way that it was easy to understand and didn’t seem at all morbid to my young mind. For that fleeting moment I felt sad that no one would ever visit me when I was gone and celebrate my life with gifts, flowers, food, and community. This feast for the dead is a very old custom or tradition in Mexico.

Maybe we could learn from this old custom to create a new tradition for Halloween.

Mourning Rings

The Victorian Age was the period of 1860-1902. This historical time was named after Queen Victoria. In America this was time before the industrial boom and after the Civil War.

Queen Victoria mourned her husband Prince Albert for over 20 years and the Civil War created nationwide grief and mourning rings became a part of grief fashion. It was expected that a woman would were black when in mourning for two years with the loss of a husband, parents were one year, and the death of a child was usually a year of black clothing.

Along with the black clothing black jewelry was also worn. Mourning jewelry was advertised as such and all necklaces, bracelets, and pins were black. Mourning rings were more personal than most mourning jewelry in that it would be engraved with the date of death, a small lock of hair would be incorporated into the ring, forget me nots, doves, or hearts were often themes of these rings.

Mourning rings made a short comeback in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Today they aren’t referred to as mourning rings but often people choose to have their loved ones ashes added to a creation which can include a ring, necklace, bracelet, and almost anything else you can imagine.