Halloween: Tricking Darkness and Death

— a COVID tale

It was Ireland and Scotland that gifted us with Halloween. It is a time of darkness and fear — daylight contracts to less than ten hours a day, and our forebears worried about surviving lean times and sickness in the coming winter. The scrim that separates the living from the dead, and the human from the mites of magic and mischief, is at its threadiest. The Celts of 2,000 years ago, and the Wiccans of every age, call it Samhain (“sow-win”), and it is the celebration of the new year. As befits the new year, there was a bit of cleaning…