Where do all the holidays come from? Well the most of them come from way back in time. That doesn’t count for ones like Presidents day exactly because that is for our Presidents. However you can bet that the ruler from very ancient times had some kind of a day for themselves. They were politicians after all.
Just for kicks lets check the story on the old holiday Samhain. That or precursors can be traced back to the stone age. So that makes it fit into our little exploration.
Let me explain that even though the ancients didn’t have our kind of clocks they did know that through the year the time between sunrise and sunset wasn’t the same every day. Early on they figured out that there were four major days in a year. They were the two equinoxes and winter and summer solstice. These were equal sun and night time and the shortest day and the longest day. Also we will look at the Celtic people and the Roman folks.
Those two folks, more or less, existed simultaneously in Europe. We don’t know a lot about what was happening in North America at the time. The Celts took those four days mentioned above one step further. They counted halfway between the spring equinox and summer solstice and called it Beltane. It was also the beginning of summer to them. We now call that May Day.
Another halfway point was between fall equinox and winter solstice. That’s the one they called Samhain. It was the end of summer to the Celts. That was at the beginning of winter or the dark time. There is your first clue.
About 700BCE the Romans made a calendar of ten months that ended with December. Their eighth month was October. For some unknown reason they just didn’t have any month names to cover the 62 days of winter. That year started in March. With the 62 days it made a solar year. About 300 years later they added January and February. That made October the tenth month instead of the eighth. Julius Caesar made the Julian calendar which got the number month twelve and days almost right. It messed up the dates of the equinoxes. But it stayed pretty much the same until 1582 when the Gregorian calendar went into effect to get the equinoxes corrected. It is the one we mostly use now.
So now we can directly assess Samhain holiday. It is relatively obvious that with our current calendar the midpoint or Samhain is the end of October. We call that day Halloween.
In the Celtic Version Samhain was when the veil between the real world and the spirit world was the thinnest and the ghosts and goblins could come to this side and visit, or haunt, those of us here. So the Halloween tradition continues in the tenth month that was the eighth that once was the beginning of the Dark days. Even though there have been changes, we continues to celebrate the old holidays.
