Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
The snow came. Wet and heavy, it presses down on tree branches, putting those with leaves under stress. These snows can crack limbs as it did to the cedar trees we cultivated for so long just off our deck.
These early snows are not the snows of romance and greeting cards. They clump and weigh, turn immediately into slush underfoot, leaking through footwear. They don’t last long since the same temperatures that create them, once daylight appears, will begin to melt them.
They can drop the temperature since snow cover is one of the factors that keeps a winter cold. It’s the albedo effect. White snow reflects the sunlight back into space, where it warms the air, but not the ground. That’s also why Minnesota’s tendency under previous climate regimes to keep snow cover around for the whole winter made us colder. If the earth is bare, it soaks up some of the sun’s heat and raises air temperature near the ground.
In the months after Samhain the sun recedes, losing power. Not only are the days shorter, but the angle of the sun spreads what sunlight we receive over a larger area, weakening its intensity. These are not months favorable to the vegetative world. In reading an article about Samhain in the New York Times the writer reminded me of a key element of the Samhain season, the tallying up of the amount of fodder available to feed animals.
When the number of animals exceeded the available feed, farmers culled their herds until they were sustainable. This meant that there was often meat at Samhain, but the slaughter added another death related aspect to the holiday.
