A feast that moved house
By November 1, most people have already filed the season under “Halloween, over.” The holiday standing right behind the costumes gets a fraction of the attention, which is a shame, because All Saints’ Day has a better backstory than any plastic skeleton on your neighbor’s lawn.
It began as a spring feast. In 609, Pope Boniface IV turned the Pantheon in Rome into a church for the Virgin Mary and the martyrs, and the Church marked the occasion on May 13. The switch to November 1 is usually credited to Pope Gregory III, who dedicated a chapel in St. Peter’s to all the saints in the 730s, although historians still argue about the exact date. About a century later, Gregory IV told the whole Western Church to keep the feast on November 1. You will often read that the date was chosen to compete with the Celtic harvest festival of Samhain. It makes a tidy story and may be partly true, but nobody has pinned it down.
Who the day is for
The idea is in the name. Plenty of saints already have their own day: Francis in October, Patrick in March. All Saints’ covers everyone else, including the ones whose holiness only God has on record.
Most of us picture saints as people in stained glass, with halos and spectacular deaths. This feast pulls the other way. It says the aunt who kept a whole street fed through one bad winter, and never mentioned it, belongs in the same company as the names carved over the church door. Call that sentimental if you like. I find it the most democratic idea in the Christian calendar, and a useful correction for anyone who thinks goodness has to be famous to count.
Which church, which Sunday
For Catholics of the Latin rite, November 1 is a holy day of obligation, meaning Mass is expected even when the date falls on a Tuesday. This year it lands on a Sunday, so the calendar has made the decision for you. Eastern churches keep the feast on the first Sunday after Pentecost, which is why an Orthodox friend won’t be wishing you a happy All Saints’ in autumn. Many Protestant churches held on to the day after the Reformation. Methodists and a number of Lutheran congregations move it to the first Sunday in November, and plenty of those services read out the names of members who died during the past year, with a bell rung for each. It takes ten minutes, and nobody checks their phone.
In A World Full Of Witches Love Jesus a Sarcastic People T-Shirt
Saints on the first, souls on the second
People mix these two up constantly, so here is the short version. November 1 honors those the Church believes have already reached heaven. November 2, All Souls’ Day, is for the faithful dead who may still be in purgatory, and the practice is to pray for them. All Souls’ came later, linked to the abbey of Cluny around the year 1000, and it spread widely in the plague-ridden 1300s, when almost everyone had someone to mourn. Here is the funny part. Strictly speaking, a visit to your grandfather’s grave belongs on the second. In practice, most of Europe goes on the first, because that is the day off work. Doctrine says one thing, the office calendar says another, and the calendar usually wins.
Candles and chrysanthemums
Walk into a Polish or Romanian cemetery on (Day of The Dead – “Luminația – Ziua Morților”) the evening of November 1 and the graves glow. Families light candles by the hundreds, and Warsaw’s Powązki, where more than a million people are buried, turns up in photo galleries every year for exactly this reason. The flower of the day is the chrysanthemum. A Dutch florists’ survey found it made up about 63 percent of the single-flower bouquets Poles bought for the occasion, and more than half in France and Italy. The French habit is often tied to the first Armistice Day after the First World War, when chrysanthemums happened to be what was blooming and ended up on thousands of war memorials. The practical lesson is for dinner guests: don’t bring them to a French or Italian host. You will have accidentally delivered a funeral arrangement.
What it does to your head
Jesus knows your spot T-Shirt
Elsewhere, the mood changes
In the Philippines the day is Undas, and it looks nothing like a hushed vigil. Families scrub and repaint the tombs beforehand, then arrive with mats, tents, folding chairs, big pots of food and sometimes a karaoke machine. Historians trace the custom to the Spanish colonial period, when it traveled from Mexico along the Manila galleon route and blended with older native practices such as leaving food for the dead. Some cities now ban overnight stays, so the all-night picnic is shrinking, but the roads out of Manila still clog before November 1.
Portugal sends its children out in the morning. They knock on doors calling “Pão-por-Deus,” bread for God’s sake, and go home with cakes, nuts and pomegranates. The custom has records going back to the 15th century. When the Lisbon earthquake struck on November 1, 1755, survivors reportedly had to beg for bread in neighboring towns, and the day has carried that memory ever since.
Spain handles grief with sugar. Huesos de santo are marzipan tubes filled with sweet egg-yolk custard and meant to look like bones, and Catalonia has panellets, little almond balls rolled in pine nuts. In Sicily, children are told the dead will leave them sweets if they keep praying for them all year.
Posting without being weird about it
Here is a view some people won’t like: the stock quote graphic with a dove on it is the weakest post you can make. Anything you could have copied from a stranger reads as copied. Post one specific thing instead, like a photo of a recipe card in your grandmother’s handwriting, or a single name and what that person was like on a bad Tuesday.
A few small rules help. Ask before photographing a grave that isn’t your family’s, since candles look beautiful and the people standing beside them are grieving. Stick to one or two hashtags, such as #AllSaintsDay or a local one like #Undas or #Toussaint. And if your feed that morning is full of leftover costume photos, you are allowed to be the quiet post. The Catholic bishops of the Philippines have even pointed to cemetery photos as a way for overseas workers to pray for relatives they cannot visit, so remembrance through a screen has decent precedent.
Something to hum
The anthem of the day is “For All the Saints,” written in 1864 by William Walsham How, an English clergyman who later became a bishop, in eleven stanzas that most hymnals trim. The tune most people know arrived in 1906, when Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote Sine Nomine for it. The name means “without name,” a nod to the unnamed saints, and it fits. The verses mostly run in unison over a walking bass line, and the alleluias show up a beat earlier than your ear expects. It sounds like a long procession arriving, which is the point.
For something on kitchen-table scale, “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God,” written for children in 1929, is about ordinary working people being holy. The Litany of the Saints, a chanted roll call of names answered again and again with “pray for us,” suits a candlelit evening. And “When the Saints Go Marching In” is no feast hymn, but New Orleans funeral bands turned it into the sound of grief changing direction, and nobody will stop you from putting it on. Light a candle and say one name out loud. Then stay ten minutes longer than you planned. Somewhere that evening a man will be wiping a marble slab with a rag he keeps in the car for exactly this, and he won’t be in any hurry.
Sources
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, “All Saints’ Day”
• Wikipedia, “All Saints’ Day” (Hallowmas) and “For All the Saints”
• The Catholic Company, “Who established All Saints Day?”
• Catholic Review (Archdiocese of Baltimore), “All Saints’ Day”
• Almanac.com, “What’s the difference between All Saints Day and All Souls Day?”
• Legend Urn, “All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day: what is the difference?”
• HortiDaily, “Chrysanthemum as the flower for All Saints Day” (FloraHolland consumer panel)
• Mamalisa’s World, “Never Give a French Person Chrysanthemums”
• Stars and Stripes Europe, “All Saint’s Day in Poland”
• CathNews New Zealand, coverage of Undas
• Fascinating Spain, “All Saints’ Day’s traditional Spanish sweets”; Afar, “Better than Halloween: The Most Unusual Fall Traditions Around Europe”
Read more interesting stories
National Cat Day. What National Cat Day Is Actually For
National Chocolate Day. Eat the Bar, Then Read the Wrapper
Eat Real Is a Fine Slogan. Now Let’s Talk About Money
