Batty for Samhain

Happy Halloween / Samhain!

To celebrate this time of year, I've got some lovely batty friends to share with you.

This is an amigurumi bat I made with some special effects thrown in:

Here he is without effects. He's quite cute actually.

Halloween has developed into a very different thing from its original purpose. It wasn't always about ghosts and witches, or even "Scary Monsters and Super Creeps" :) Originally called Samhain, it was a festival to celebrate the end of the year. Over two thousand years ago during the Iron Age, this was their New Year, a time to celebrate the end of the old, the beginning of the new and the onset of winter.

They used to have bonfires and feasts. It was also a time when the veil between the worlds became very thin, so the spirits of the Otherworld could come into our world and people could easily accidentally wander into the Otherworld never to be seen again.

It wasn't about being scary or frightening people, though the spirits coming through may have been something to guard against, but it was about a celebration of the turning of the year, the cycles of nature and probably for the harvest they'd had. That would have included apples, of course, which became used, as Samhain developed, in the tradition of apple bobbing - one old thing that still survives. Turnips were carved, not pumpkins, to give light in the darkness and to ward off evil beings in the centuries that followed, especially when Christianity became widespread.

So, although I've made a bat and drawn and painted another, I sometimes wish we could go back to the earlier, nature-based celebration rather than the monster and skeleton stuff of today. But, in the end, it's a bit of fun before the darkness of winter.

Have a spooky day! :)