Family Heritage Night

October 31st: Halloween, All Hallows Eve, Reformation Day. One night, so many names. At our house, we call it Family Heritage Night, an evening set aside for the recounting of family genealogies, the sharing of family stories, and the sampling of foods from our ancestral countries.

We began celebrating this “holiday” more than ten years ago when we decided to scale back our observance of Halloween. Our neighborhood has few, if any, children who trick-or-treat locally so the pressure to keep a traditional Halloween is very low; so low, in fact, that last night at 6:00 pm when I ventured outside with the trash, I was greeted by a street where the only visible “home fire” that was burning was mine. The other houses were dark: no porch lights illuminating doors, no jack-o-lanterns glowing on steps, nothing. Pitch black. The two homes with young children were empty, presumably vacated in favor of Halloween parties elsewhere.

Learning more about the history of the holiday also lowered the pressure to keep a traditional Halloween. My family and I found that we weren’t really enamored by the “spooky fun” of the day after knowing, for example, that in ancient times Samhain, the Celtic festival of fire (and a distant cousin to our modern-day Halloween), was a day to practice divination, allegedly involving gruesome sacrifices. The legend behind the jack-o-lantern wasn’t too appealing either. You know the one: Jack was a miser rejected by both God and Satan, doomed to walk the earth with his own bit of hellfire to keep him company. And then there was the whole idea that, on Samhain, the barrier between the natural and supernatural worlds was temporarily suspended so that divine beings and the spirits of the dead could travel freely amongst humans, interfering in the affairs of men, sometimes violently. Granted, modern-day Halloween has been redefined as an evening for frolic and fun, as opposed to an evening for communion with the dead. Still, as Christians, the holiday just wasn’t working for us anymore.

That said, we didn’t want to completely abandon the idea of a fall celebration. The traditional harvest festival was an option, but the idea of recognizing the bounty of the earth in October seemed a bit misplaced since that was the point of Thanksgiving in November. In the end, we took a cue from the liturgical church year and centered our “holiday” on the idea of remembering our departed loved ones (ala All Saints Day), a good fit for my family given our interest in genealogy.

So, what did we do on Family Heritage Night? We started with dinner featuring a selection of foods from some of our ancestral countries. This year that meant:

Poland: Kielbasa
Poland: Pierogies
England: Spiced Pomegranate Cider
Scotland: Barley Mushroom Casserole
Scotland: Scottish Shortbread

The Polish food actually served two purposes: honoring the background of my father’s family and that of our guests, JLZ and his mother, DC. The English food recognized my husband’s heritage, while the Scottish food hearkened back to my mother’s maternal line. A treat this year: my daughter prepared the casserole and the shortbread. Both were delicious!

During dinner and after, we shared stories from our family history and listened while our friends shared some from theirs. We also indulged in two activities that paid homage to the “fun and frolic” of the day --- carving a pumpkin and watching the 1993 Disney film Hocus Pocus. The pumpkin was our table centerpiece, cut earlier in the day with the outline of a thistle, the Scottish national flower. The movie was just for laughs.

Halloween, All Hallows Eve, Reformation Day, or Family Heritage Night. One night, so many names. Whichever you observed, I hope you had an enjoyable celebration.