One Kind Favor

Looks like a Samhain (Nov 1, cross-quarter day, Celtic New Year’s) tradition to honor the dead by cleaning the grave and/or illuminating the night for them.

A possible clue: “in some of the English-Scotch-Irish countries, people kept their relatives’ graves free from grass. Why? Because grass growing on a grave indicated that the deceased was not cared for by his relatives.” Story link.

A couple of snips from some Louisiana folklore that may shed some light (no pun int.):

But what they inadvertently encountered—if the story recounts real events at all–was only the custom of marking All Saints’ Day, November 1, by going at nightfall to newly cleaned and flower-decorated graveyards and placing lighted candles on the graves to honor the dead. This ritual still has great vitality in Lacombe, and it is practiced in several other Louisiana communities, though it is little known in other parts of the United States (where All Saints’ Day is nonetheless a Catholic Holy Day of Obligation and marked in other ways).

…snip…

All Saints’ Day, we know–including Halloween which precedes it (and takes its name from being the Eve of All Hallows, as All Saints’ is more commonly known in England)–is perhaps the oldest continuously celebrated holiday in the Western world. It stems, ultimately, from a holiday in the ancient Celtic calendar called Samhain (pronounced something like Sah-ween), which was one of the “cross-quarter” days of the Celts. These were the days which fell exactly between any seasonal solstice and equinox and mark the transition to a new season. In traditional cultures, liminal time periods, those that lie on the borders between seasons of the year or “seasons” of life, are often thought to be dangerous or in some way powerful times. Samhain was the Celtic New Year, marking the border between the old year and the new. It was also believed to be the time when the souls of everyone who had died that year went to the other world. In this and other cultures this time of year was associated with the presence of spirits in the physical world, an idea which carries over into our Halloween, of course. The ancient Celts lit bonfires on Samhain, possibly to light the spirits’ way to the next world or possibly to keep them away from humans. That use of fire would conceivably be the ultimate origin of lighted jack-o’-lanterns for Halloween and for the use of a mass of candles in cemeteries on All Saints’ night in Louisiana and in Mexico (where they play an important role in celebrating the Dias de las Muertos, the “Days of the Dead,” the important holidays surrounding All Saints’).

Very primal urge that one. To be remembered. This year I planted a Ginkgo and a Chinese Dawn Redwood (metasequoia), both living fossils, on a magnetic north-south axis in my yard. If well tended, they’ll live 2,000 or more years. No one will have a clue as to who put them there but they’ll know why – to be remembered, even anonymously.

Satya.