Douglas Firs and Apple Trees
by Bill Palmer and Ellyn Sanna

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Douglas Firs and Apple Trees </br>by Bill Palmer and Ellyn Sanna

My Christmas tree this year is a beautiful Frasier fir, for which I paid a whopping $45 at Kodey’s Tree Farm on the first Sunday of December. It meets my late father’s minimum requirement that it scrapes the ceiling of my living room. But in honor of my Dad, there’s no way it could have come into the house until it was almost Christmas (my family followed a now-almost-extinct tradition that the tree did not go up until Christmas Eve because the preceding weeks of Advent were a time of spiritual preparation for the Big Day and very much NOT part of the Christmas Season). 

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Best Wishes at Samhain! by Bill Palmer

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Best Wishes at Samhain! by Bill Palmer

It seems simple enough. “Hallowe’en” (and I’ll use the traditional spelling here) is a contraction of “All Hallows Eve.”  It is the evening before “All Hallows Day” (hallow meaning holy) which is ye olde English name for All Saints Day, the first of November, when the holy dead in Heaven are commemorated by the Church. Hallowe’en begins a short cycle of Holy Days which ends on November second with prayers for the not-so-holy dead, the poor souls in Purgatory as my Irish grandmother referred to them, on All Souls Day. Thus I was taught by the Sisters of Saint Dominic in my suburban parochial school fifty years ago. Hallowe’en was Catholic. It was, even better; it was Irish Catholic! 

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