The Spooky Season

Lawn decorations of skeletons and gravestones are starting to come down. Election campaign yard signs may soon follow suit, and with luck the deluge of political emails and texts will ease. Plants are dying; trees are shedding their leaves. It’s the spooky season, the time between harvest and winter when darkness is closing in. In a modern tweak on an ancient observance, the end of Daylight Savings Time drives the point home.

Early Christians venerated their martyrs in a variety of local observances on sundry dates. Over time they added non-martyred saints and eventually all the dead in heaven. In the 700s, Pope Gregory III fixed All Saints’ Day on Nov. 1 for all of Western Christendom, to coincide with the dedication of a chapel to “All the Saints” in Saint Peter’s in Rome.

With the day before (All Hallows’ Eve or Halloween) and the day after (All Souls’ Day, for the dead still in purgatory), this observance of the darkening time absorbed or inspired Samhain in Ireland and the Day of the Dead in Mexico. Whether in remembrance of the saints, celebration of the ancestors, or terror of ghosts, death at this season takes center stage.

It’s not entirely coincidence that Election Day falls so soon after Halloween. Using the authority given it by Article I, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution, Congress in 1845 set the date for federal elections as the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November. Most voters were farmers, who often lived a distance from their polling places. By early November the harvest was done, and the weather was still mild enough for travel. When Nov. l fell on a Tuesday, voting would take place a week later so as not to conflict with All Saints’ Day.

As for whether to approach Election Day with celebration or fingernail-biting fear, let alone metaphors of darkening and death, I leave it to you to decide.

Image: The Dance of Death (1493) by Michael Wolgemut, from the Nuremberg Chronicle of Hartmann Schedel.