Yanno, I never really thought much about Halloween as anything but a one-day celebration, involving dressing up, overloading on candy and a veritable explosion of pumpkin spice flavored EVERYthing.
Perhaps we can only blame Starbucks for the pumpkin spice thing...
Truth be known, I didn't even grow up with pumpkin stuff. There was no "Halloween" in 1960's and early 1970's Denmark. There's Halloween now, but it's an "imported" holiday. Festival. Celebration. Whatever...
I think I got a little overcooked on Halloween during the years I had a retail store in Austin and the day would bring a constant parade of chocolate-fingered urchins who were invariably wired up on sugar.
Fall colors...
No, I'm not auditioning to be the Grinch, I was just never very keen on the practice of "unparenting" as it collided with a store filled with expensive glassware.
"Why didn't you just put up a sign?"
Please refer back to the "unparenting" bit...
But I'm wandering a bit, here. So there was Halloween... and since I was living in south-central Texas at the time, I was also well aware of the Mexican Dia de los Muertos celebration to start off November, but I never really connected the dots.
Yes, I'm slow sometimes...
A Bit of Research
So Halloween is basically a "version" of All Hallows Eve, which I vaguely remember from my boarding school days in the UK. And All Hallows Eve is the evening before All Saints Day, which is November 1st. And then November 2nd is All Souls Day. And Dia de los Muertos bridges the two, actually being more of an overnight thing on November 1-2.
Pausing for a bit, but still not feeling super enthusiastic about the whole thing.
Back to HiveBloPoMo — Who Died?
I'll bring this around vaguely to today's #hiveblopomo prompt of sharing a memory of a departed loved one.
I guess when you age, you become more aware that you have a lot of departed loved ones in your world.
Afternoon sun...
All the same, I guess I don't spend a lot of time waxing nostalgic about people who are no longer with us.
That said, I often mention my Aunt Ulla from Denmark... the one who helped raise me in Denmark, when my errant parents were galivanting around the world. She did have a major influence on my life and the person I became... and for that I am grateful.
I also learned a lot of practical things about life, particularly from the angle of self-reliance when you live alone and have nobody who's going to help you with ANYthing.
This would include how to move very heavy things around as a single individual without hurting yourself, and how to plan time consuming and complicated things in such a way they don't take up all your time.
Above all, she taught me patience and how to take it easy in the face of things not turning out as expected. Perhaps that's what I feel the most grateful for, as we live in this rather messed up and often frustrating universe!
As I reflect on that some more, I realize that hardly a day goes by in which I am not applying something I learned from her, to my life.
Much gratitude!
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Created at 2023-11-02 14:20 PDT
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