The holiday of dark and light

It is a beautiful and overwhelming picture. All those candles, all those names on the tombstones flickering shadows, every cemetery in the country lit up in honor to our loved ones. It is All Saint’s Day (Allhelgonadagen) in Sweden. A church holiday that is becoming more and more dear to us, it seems. The time for remembering, loving and letting go.

As we need to let go of sights, places and habits too. The Thornberg Building (Thornbergska huset) in Umeå is now all down, a huge encaged pit of demolished concrete, left to our fantasy of what’s going to come. And in Seattle the southern mile of The Alaskan Way Viaduct is gone and the rest of the Viaduct open to traffic again until the next piece of it will become history. These are times for change.

Halloween did come and go too. In Sweden Halloween is a pretty recent phenomenon that to start with stirred up a lot of feelings and still is leaving us in some kind of confusion. My first Halloween was in 1996. My sons were 8 and 10, overly excited to pick up their first pumpkin at a pumpkin farm with their American “grandfather” Harold and aunt Autumn. All afternoon was creative carving in our Portage bay backyard, oh those proud boys in their Fred Meyer costumes next to the pumpkin lanterns before going to their next-door friend Carel’s favorite Haunted House in Montlake. No other Halloween can match that first one.

Back in Sweden the year after, the sons were happily surprised though to discover big spiders, skeletons, and sticky webs even in the stores over here this time of year! The grandmother generation wasn’t as pleased though. This was just one more American thing we didn’t understand and hadn’t asked for, and it certainly didn’t match our All Saints Day tradition. On the contrary, quite a collision. And to be honest, our trick or treating was kind of lame and shy, as we didn’t really know how to do this. And we couldn’t even quite figure out which day to do it. We still don’t, kind of.

Halloween came to stay though, although the event has changed to be of a more Swedish modest nature. I would say we needed a reason for a good fall party, so why not! But it’s still that confusion about when to do it. This year though, we seemed to agree on Halloween last week, leaving this weekend to the more peaceful Swedish tradition of the All Saints.

So, this dark afternoon my now grown up sons visited their grandparent’s grave in the small town where I grew up, together with their cousins and their moms. We brought decorations and we lit candles in the lantern. We quietly sang grandma’s favorite hymns and smiled at grandpa’s playful jokes accompanied by the lively creak at their feet, and we could feel the spirit and see the lights of their friends in the glowing cemetery. And I was moved learning that later tonight my oldest son and his friends are having a sit down dinner together remembering and telling stories about their gone loved ones. Maybe the conflict between Halloween and All Saint’s Day has made our Swedish tradition dearer to us. More valuable. Lighter. We are embracing it and even coming up with new ways of celebrating. All Saint’s Day has become the holiday coming out of the dark.