Autumn’s Mini Holy Season 

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Consider observing this ancient holy season to renew and enrich your spiritual life this autumn. 

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“Denning up,” a friend of mine terms the isolating impulse so many of us feel in autumn as the shortening daylight and deepening chill inspire melancholy, or worse, seasonal depression. Though autumn does bring cerulean skies and bright foliage, the comfort of old favorite sweaters and tasty soups, its dwindling foliage and early sunsets can also trigger unhelpful brooding on old losses and aging. Advent can feel so far away and ordinary time after Pentecost, well, a little too ordinary as its three dozen weeks stretch on. 

If your own faith could use an autumnal boost right about now—or if you’ve caught yourself daydreaming about the holidays to come instead of focusing on the spiritual opportunities of the present—you might be interested to learn that our Christian ancestors celebrated a very festive three-day traditional holy season smack-dab in the middle of fall called Allhallowtide.

Though a folk designation rather than an ecclesiastically recognized season, this observance combined three Catholic liturgical celebrations—the vigil for All Saints’ Day on October 31 (now suspended), the feast of All Saints on November 1, and the Commemoration of All Souls on November 2. 

What a sweet, quaint idea! I thought when I came across the history of Allhallowtide a decade ago. This might be just the thing to give me the spiritual recharging I need this time of year! 

And boy, has it ever—in fact, Allhallowtide has become a mini holy season I anticipate with great pleasure. Though I’ve always found All Saints’ and All Souls’ celebrations deeply moving, I’ve discovered that thinking of them as part of a thematically linked three-day conversation of days makes them even richer. In fact, I’ve come to imagine them as a complementary seasonal bookend to spring’s paschal triduum. 

While in spring we celebrate Christ’s resurrection and promise of eternal life, autumn’s Allhallowtide prompts us to ponder the personal working out of that “harvest.” How, exactly, might that general promise of Easter manifest for our flawed selves, our departed loved ones, and all who have died? What might the afterlife be like? Can we possibly communicate with those who have reached it and they with us, even though the dead will “be changed” in a mysterious way after death, as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:51–52? 

Fortunately, Allhallowtide speaks to all of these questions with anticipatory comfort and joy, illuminating the darkening days with hopeful faith and reminding us that this autumn season is a proper hour to seek the Lord, offering a framework uniquely suited to the musings inspired by the year’s winding down. 

All Hallows’ Eve 

While Halloween is a secular holiday—one some consider an unsavory one—the night of October 31 bears a holy legacy much longer than its association with costumes, slasher films, and wild parties. If you’d been a faithful Catholic in 1450 or 1940, you’d have spent that evening preparing for the solemnity of All Saints with fasting, penance, and obligatory attendance at a solemn vigil Mass.

You might have joined a communal procession through church burial grounds, decorated graves, or set aside time at home to pray for the souls of loved ones. Only in 1955, when Pope Pius XII halved the number of vigils to simplify the liturgy, was this vigil officially suspended in the Catholic tradition (though Episcopalians still celebrate it). 

The rowdiness came as an add-on when early missionaries to Northern Europe courted Celtic peoples by conflating the date of All Saints with their ancient pagan harvest festival of Samhain (according to many scholars, anyway). Samhain had been a time for mischief-making, fortune telling, casting spells, summoning spirits of the dead and dark forces, sexual license, and pagan rituals; though conversion efforts were remarkably successful, these old ways continued to exist alongside Christian practices.

Over time they became for most who practiced them quaint pop-culture merriment or rebellious dark fun, trickling down to inform celebrations of the modern secular Halloween. 

As a Christian, you might be inclined to dismiss the conflation of Samhain and All Hallows’ Eve (hallows means “holy ones” or “saints”) and its venal offshoots as a source of unfortunate distraction. However, I suspect that those missionaries weren’t merely opportunistic but on to something important about the general human instinct for faith. 

Yes, the ancient Celts were deeply mistaken about the nature of the supernatural forces they felt around them. But they instinctively and without question accepted that such forces existed. They accepted that the spirits of the dead lived on and could communicate (especially on Samhain, when the veil between heaven and earth was said to thin). They believed that the living could aid and comfort the dead in return. They accepted the existence of marvels and wonders that transcended natural law. 

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It seems to me, those Celts were more in line with our perspective than 21st-century atheists who scoff at anything that can’t be rationally proven. Those missionaries recognized fertile ground; they just had to enlighten their students’ understanding. 

In any case, you must admit that fully celebrating the two days following All Hallows’ Eve—whose Scriptures and theology are bursting with truths that defy rational parsing—requires us to suspend any doubt we may harbor about the reality of holy marvels and wonders in our world. Practice “believing where we cannot prove,” as the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote. 

You might evoke your beloved dead through intercessory prayers, light candles, decorate graves, and imagine what advice those now with God might offer about current dilemmas. You might honor the sense of a thinned veil by staying open in heart and mind for the Holy Spirit’s promptings. You might revisit favorite Scriptures that describe miracles and direct God-human contact. Feel—don’t overthink. 

All Saints 

Commemorated on November 1, the feast of All Saints is among the most venerable celebrations in the Church year, with roots stretching back to Roman times, when congregations remembered local martyrs on the dates of their deaths. After records were consolidated in the fourth century, general feasts of martyrs were held, initially in the spring, then in the seventh century fixed on November 1. 

This feast is dedicated to remembering and celebrating these glorious “friends above,” defined by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops as “persons in heaven (officially canonized or not), who lived heroically virtuous lives, offered their lives for others, or were martyred for the faith, and who are worthy of imitation.” We’re taught that these exemplary ones stand even now, translated directly to heaven, at God’s side ready to assist the living through direct intercession; we believe that we can cultivate ongoing personal relationships with the ones who are our patrons. 

How gloriously these holy ones shine! In fact, the stories of their torments, sacrifices, and lives of utter dedication to doing God’s will despite pain and deprivation can feel impossibly far beyond ordinary mortals’ capacities of endurance. 

Yet our faith is quick to assure us that the saints were once earthly humans, as we are, people who faced the same challenges and temptations, people whose lives were not always perfect but who nevertheless found a way to listen for God’s voice and align their lives with his will. Pope Francis emphasized in March 2024 that saints are not “exceptions of humanity . . . a small circle of champions who live beyond the limits of our species,” but ordinary people who listened faithfully to God’s voice and “fully became themselves,” accepting their individual callings to do the work for which they were formed. 

The readings on this holy day of obligation invite us to dream that we might join this holy assembly. As I listen each year, I find myself imagining saints and holy people with whom I’m especially close—Teresa of Ávila, Elizabeth Ann Seton, Dorothy Day—standing among that crowd, and I figuratively wave to them. I wonder what they made of those mysterious, glorious words when they were alive and dream of what they might know now. 

Besides attending Mass, this is a day to cultivate friendships with the holy men and women who are already your patrons. Engage in conversation with them, read about them, study what they wrote. You might browse dictionaries of patronage and meet new heavenly mentors. You might also schedule a gathering for friends to share stories of everyone’s patrons—a communion of saints in more ways than one. 

All Souls 

The feast of All Souls concludes this little holy season by reinforcing yesterday’s proffered hope that we ordinary Christians, despite our flaws, willfulness, and sins, can aspire to shine in God’s presence, just like the saints we celebrated. Reassuring us of God’s infinite mercy, the day’s Scriptures emphasize that all who undergo confession and expiation of their sins can rest secure in the joyful hope of inheriting the kingdom prepared for them (Mt 25:34). 

Termed more formally the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (“faithful” here means baptized), this November 2 celebration is the most recently established of Allhallowtide’s sequence, grounded historically in the human compassion of a great 10th-century monastic reformer, the Benedictine Abbot Odilo of Cluny. 

The most common origin story involves a pilgrim returning from Jerusalem who was shipwrecked and consequently encountered a hermit, who reported hearing demons howl in glee over the torment of the souls in purgatory (or in rage when people prayed for them). On returning to France the pilgrim urged Odilo to increase monastic efforts in support of these suffering ones.

In response, Odilo designated November 2 as a day for Benedictine monasteries across Europe to offer alms, prayer, and sacrifice to help cleanse the souls in purgatory and prepare them for God’s presence. The observance spread, and two centuries later, November 2 was designated as a day for such intercessory efforts. 

If you’ve lost a loved one to death or are all too aware of your own sinful inclinations, you’ll find this feast comforting in its affirmation of grace-inspired second chances. Though the failings and the faults we harbor might seem overwhelming, it assures us that, thanks to our loving Creator, we’re not mere mortals held captive in time’s inexorable grasp; we’re souls with an eternal future, one presaged by Lazarus’ rising and assured by Christ’s promise. Moreover, we can actually do something now to help those loved ones who might be suffering—and what a salvific sense of agency that assurance offers. 

One of my favorite customs of the Church year is grounded in this feast, as my parish hangs banners around the church in November that bear the names of community members who have died. While there’s also a book at the back where we can write loved ones’ names, this public invitation to mutually remember together in real time has always struck me as especially beautiful, a gesture that brings these folks physically back into the space where they once joined us in worship.

And it’s become more evocative as my own years accrue. Friends are on the most recent lists as well as people with whom I’ve worked in hospice care. Now individuals who have died live for me in the church’s quiet, and that assurance comforts me. 

So, yes, pray on this day for those you love and those you knew and those you didn’t. Consider making your own personal list of names to hang in your house during November, as I do. And if you have a little extra time this month, perhaps you might also embrace a suggestion I once heard offered in an All Souls’ homily: Pray this month also for living ones who find themselves currently in some earthly purgatory—those suffering from loss, illness or infirmity, despair, loneliness, guilt, failing hope. 

An Invitation 

“Three days when you’re supposed to think about dead people and death?” somebody remarked the other day when I mentioned my happy anticipation of this upcoming Allhallowtide. “That sounds kind of depressing, actually.” 

Quite the opposite, I assured her. Sobering, yes, but much healthier than trying to avoid the subject, as many do. The three days are filled with a comforting narrative of heavenly grace and God-directed wonders. A narrative that invites us to rest assured that our personal changes might someday bring us gloriously home. 

Feeling a little blah as the days grow shorter and colder this time of year? Need some spiritual renewal? This ancient “autumn triduum” of Allhallowtide stands ready to open your mind, comfort your heart, and fill your soul.

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