Days for honoring saints have roots in ancient calendar

All Saints’ Day and May Day holidays are six months apart, yet the two have more in common than most people realize.
   
In some cultures, the two holidays are celebrations of the lives of saints and each date follows a night when the forces of evil are believed to be more active than usual.
   
Although many Alabama Baptists and Baptists elsewhere do not usually recognize All Saints’ Day — occurring the day after Halloween — Lutherans, Episcopalians and some Methodist churches celebrate All Saints’ Day. Catholics regard it as an obligatory holy day.
   
Walter Blackmon, pastor of East Highland Baptist Church, Hartselle, said it is not surprising that Baptists do not recognize the day.
   
“Baptists regard all believers to be saints. The closest Baptists might come would be in the Decoration Day tradition,” he said. “It has nothing to do with All Saints’ Day, but this is the time many Baptist churches choose to honor our dead.”
   
All Saints’ Day has been celebrated at least since the fourth century. It is a date set aside to commemorate the lives of all saints and martyrs, especially those who do not have another day named for them.
   
The night that precedes All Saints’ Day, Halloween, is also known as All Hallow’s Eve, or the eve of all the holy ones.
   
Most western cultures have some type of celebration that night, usually including pranks, bonfires, noise-making and dressing in disguises.
   
Like All Saints’ Day, May Day — occuring May 1 — follows a night of evil emphasis. Known in some places as the feast of St. Walburga, the day was set aside to honor  the eighth-century English nun who was a missionary in Germany. Since St. Walburga was regarded as a saint who offered protection against witchcraft and sorcery, the night preceding her feast became a time to try to drive off evil spirits.
   
Legend has it that the night before her celebration, known as Walpurgisnacht, witches gathered to have their last fling before spring.
   
In parts of Germany, little girls dress up like witches and carry sticks in their hands. The boys ride stick horses and make a lot of noise, using everything from boards to beat on the ground to guns. Youth roam around that night playing tricks like covering cars with toilet paper and smearing toothpaste on door handles.
   
All Saints’ Day and May Day fall across from each other on the calendar, one marking the beginning of spring and the other the beginning of winter.
   
If the seasons or the months were plotted on a circle like a clock, the two holidays would lie directly across from each other. May Day would fall exactly between the summer solstice and the vernal equinox, while All Saints’ Day would fall exactly between the winter solstice and the autumnal equinox.
   
Although ancient calendars looked very different from modern ones, their cultures, like ours, tended to keep time by the sun and the moon. The four seasons were generally defined by the summer solstice, the vernal equinox, the winter solstice and the autumnal equinox. The equinoxes are the two days each year when the sun is directly over the equator, marking the beginning of spring and the beginning of autumn. solstices, on the other hand, are the days when the sun is at maximum tilt to the north or south, marking the longest and shortest days of the year.
   
The ancient Celts and possibly the Anasazi Indians in North America recognized these days as
special. While the sun is not in notable positions on these days, the days have a more practical value, serving as days when, in many parts of the northern hemisphere, people began and ended agricultural
activities.
   
The Celts called these days between the Equinoxes and Solstices “cross-quarter days,” and set aside festival days to celebrate them. The major cross-quarter days are known in Ireland as Beltane and Samhain.
   
Beltane, on May 1, is a time to celebrate the coming of summer. The May Pole, a staple of May Day celebrations, is thought to have originated in Beltane festivities.
Samhain was the opposite of Beltane. On this date, people mourned the passing of the growing season and prepared for winter, or the time of death. The name means “summer’s end” and was a feast of fires in which people and animals passed between bonfires in a purification ritual.
   
In several places in the Americas and in Ireland and Scotland, archaeologists have discovered stones arranged in such a way that a beam of sunlight shines through openings on certain days of the year. The most famous of these is Stonehenge, in England.
   
Although the arrangement of the stones at Stonehenge are based on the solstices and the equinoxes, other arrangements discovered in England, Scotland, Ireland and northwestern New Mexico appear to be set up to coincide with the cross-quarter days on May 1 and November 1.
   
Modern astronomy does not recognize the existence of the cross-quarter days, but archaeologists are becoming increasingly interested in exploring the almost forgotten connections.