just an old-fashioned girl

Hello and welcome. I'm glad you dropped by. If you´re looking for something a little nostalgic of bygone eras with a timeless elegance and a little modern twist – in other words, something slightly “retro” – then you should feel right at home here in my shabby chic room. Month by month, there will always be something new to see so I hope you´ll enjoy your stay and come back again soon.

Saturday, October 31, 2015

All Souls´ Night

The origins of Halloween, also known as All Souls´Night, lie in the Celtic festival of Samhain, (a Gaelic word meaning summer´s end) which marked the end of summer and the harvest. Bonfires were lit, often to provide light for those bringing in livestock from the fields or mountains to be slaughtered for winter. On this day, the Celts believed that the door to the underworld was opened, letting in spirits. They would hold a feast, setting a place for any deceased relatives, as they were believed to visit home on this day. Malevolent spirits entered the earthly realm as well and people would dress in costume in order to confuse these spirits. This evolved into the custom of visiting houses to collect food for the feast while in costume, a precursor to trick-or-treating.

I don´t know exactly when Halloween became sanitized, commercialized and family friendly but a poem written by the American Edith Wharton in 1903 seems to indicate that it still retained its most sinister connotations around that time. Read the first verse and judge for yourself.

by
Edith Wharton

A thin moon faints in the sky o’erhead,
And dumb in the churchyard lie the dead.
Walk we not, Sweet, by garden ways,
Where the late rose hangs and the phlox delays,
But forth of the gate and down the road,
Past the church and the yews, to their dim abode.
For it’s turn of the year and All Souls’ night,
When the dead can hear and the dead have sight.

I wonder if she had something like this in mind.

By the way, if you´re a beginner and would like to know how relatively easy it was to create the above collage, watch this space and I´ll show you.... 

3 comments:

  1. Welcome back to your creative workshop cousin. Nice to have you on your feet again. Lovely work as always and a nice Halloween story.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I echo allrite jack...came here to look up some pages I have scrapped and was delighted to see your new post. Will be watching for your collage technique. I'm hoping to scrap my Mom's immediate family photos for her Christmas present. Have them in a paper album but never embellished them. So, plans are to embellish digitally and have a book printed for Mom. Then print out the embellishments, cut out and place on the paper album pages (which I have already scanned and have in digital form)...this album will be for me, so no hurry on getting it done. It's hard for Mom to handle the large bulky album full of heritage framed photos and embellishments. But I wanted them in an album so they all have a final "resting place" and not stuffed in boxes. And one day they will be embellished. I have all pages here backed up but just wanted to scroll through and get inspired. Will be doing the scrapping on my desktop rather than my laptop so I can work with a much larger screen. Pages I found posted under http://www.retrodesigning.blogspot.com/p/ct-layouts-by-scrapladyandmore.html : 2 LOs Using Nostalgic Scrapbook and 5 Under Pages with Pretty Shabby...some of these had some combined elements from other kits. Having a "gonna have to sit all day" kind of day so I hope to get started on this project today!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Wonderful All Souls Day page Helen. love the haunting feel of it.

    ReplyDelete