We celebrated Samhaim on November 1st with a feast honoring our Ancestors and the recepies they have contributed to our family fare. Granny Glavin was to be our Ancestor-Guest-of-Honor but she decided to be a Granny Lump instead and stay home so we placed a picture of her on the table in her honor and will have to wait till next year to hear the tale of the Tapioca.

Representing the Kutin's we had their famous bread stuffing. The Kmiecik's were represented with butter cookies. The Travis recepie was spaghetti and representing the Glavins was the aforementioned Tapioca. Ambiana we discovered LOVES Spagehtti!

After the feast we moved the celebration down to the riverside where we built a Samhaim Fire under a beautiful waxing gibbous moon to warm ourselves and any Ancestors that had joined us from the other side. We then cast into the fire drawings representing what each of us wanted to shed in preparation for our rebirth in the new year on the Winter Solstice. Mochi threw into the fire a sketch of a wine bottle representing the whining he no longers cares to indulge in. Colleen cast into the fire her drawing of a boxer expressing her willingness to not fight back or start fights. Next year we plan to add a chant and a dance to the ritual and we hope more people will join us

SAMHAIM- Join us for our Family Feast on November 1st!. Our carved pumpkins will be lit and placed outside to light the way for our ancestors who will be crossing over from the other side to join us for our Family Feast at sunset. We will be feasting on various family dishes that were passed down through the Kutin, travis, Meagher, Kosiniak, Kmiecik and Glavin families.

We feel that Halloween as currently celebrated by our culture does not in any conscious way connect us with the Wheel of the Year, our community, ourselves and each other. The meaning has been lost beneath a mountain of marketing and candy. It is our intention to re-capture the meaning of this ritual time of year and make it relevant to our lives.

On Samhaim when the veil between worlds is thinnest, we will honor our ancestors and keep them alive in our hearts with talk about our ancestral origins. We will also begin work on our large family tree and roots portrait which will be painted on the 4'x 6' piece of plywood that makes up the bed in the back of my pick-up. In honor of the season, a time of harvest and letting go the old to make way for the new we are making drawings representing what we want to shed this year and after dinner we will walk across the street to the river for a fire into which we will toss our sketches.