A Quiet All Saints' Day

 

With the arrival of November, I changed the arrangement in my brown vase - and added a couple of more owls... (Cf. a previous post here.)  The bigger owls (on the other side of the bowl) will remain where they are at least until it's time for Christmas decorations, I think.

During a break in the rain, some time before noon, I took out a couple of bags to the bins at the corner of my building, and extended that walk just a little bit - without photo stops, as it was pretty much the same round as on Friday.

Did not have to put much work into preparing lunch, so instead I decided to put that effort into baking a tray of my favourite cocoa/blueberry muffins, which is something I haven't done for a few weeks either. I've changed the original recipe so that I replace 3/4 of the sugar with stevia sweetener, and half the amount of wheat flour with oats.

 

Autumn Decorations

 

My autumn (fall) decorations are rather modest compared to what I see on some American blogs - we don't have quite the same tradition here of filling our homes and gardens with ghosts and carved pumpkins this time of year.

An old chest in my living room is my main place of changing decorations with the seasons, though, and the orange candles + fake orange gladiouli have been there throughout October. The other day I added my two owls (which during summer live elsewhere). In the big one you can put a tea candle (nowadays I use battery ones for safety). That one I inherited from my mum. The small one is made of solid concrete (very heavy for its size!), and I bought that one a few years ago, because it reminded me so much of the bigger one!

Today Ginny's blog post reminded me that I actually also have a small scarecrow that  rarely gets to be on display. So I added that to the brown vase for the next week or so. 

 

As scarecrows go, it's not really very scary! 

 

 

If memory serves me right, I got the scarecrowfrom my friend Gunilla up in Karlstad on some occasion. We were close friends since our early 20s. In February it will sadly be three years since she died - shortly before her 70th birthday. (She had a lot of health problems all her life, but in spite of that also managed to spread a lot of joy.) 

 

Halloween in Sweden is primarily a holiday when people remember loved ones who passed away, and visit their graves to decorate them with winter wreaths and candles. I'm not sure I'll be walking even as far as to the nearby cemetery in the week to come - but memories can be honoured in other ways, without going anywhere at all. 

Halloween / All Saints', Owls and Candles

As mentioned before, in Sweden we celebrate All Saints' Day on the first Saturday in November (i.e. today), rather than on November 1st. (The holiday was moved here back in 1952, which means it's been like that all my life.) It's a rather solemn holiday, mostly about remembering the dead, tending to family graves, and church concerts with requiems.

Nowadays it also tends to get mixed up with American Halloween traditions, though - even if many still claim that those do not belong in our culture; or should at least be limited to the night of October 31st (never mind what day of the week). Others argue that as All Saints has been moved, then Halloween should also be celebrated on the Friday before All Saints. And with schools nowadays also closed a whole week for "autumn leave" (no such thing back in my own school days!), Halloween time now tends to sort of spread out to cover two weekends + the week in between!

For me, All Saints used to be a rather gloomy holiday (sad rather than festive and child-friendly). Nowadays, I feel more free to celebrate or ignore it as I please, though.

In my own home, decorations for autumn/Halloween/All Saints are sparse. Basically, I just change the display on the old chest in my living room a bit - adding a bit of orange, and featuring my owl collection. (If you can call just a handful of something a collection!)

 

These tiny ones sit on the rim of my vase of fake twigs.
(They can also sit on a plant pot.)

 

The big one used to be my mother's. You can put a tea candle inside it. With a real candle, it gets very hot, though... So I sometimes put a battery candle in it instead.

 

Back in summer I found this little one in a souvenir shop and added it to the "collection". It's small but heavy - made of solid concrete. I fell for it because it reminded me of the bigger hollow one, and I thought they might like each other's company... ;-)

On another wall (all year round) hangs an owl made in batik technique, made by my maternal grandfather back in 1976. He made quite a lot of batik art back in those days. I think I got this one for either my birthday or Christmas that year.

 For this weekend, I put a lantern with a battery candle in my living room window. That's for all the family graves that I don't visit... The lantern may get stay up until it's time to put up Advent candles instead, though. (Or until the battery runs out; whichever comes first.)

I did also go out to put a real candle on the one family grave we have in the old cemetery nearby where I "always" walk, though. Someone else had been there before me:

 

December 13

Postcards for the Weekend – Patterns

Maria’s chosen postcard theme for this weekend is Patterns & Prints.

Flickering through my postcrossing cards from last year, some “owl patterns” stood out for me:

From Russia, April 2016. Card printed in Finland.

From France, May 2016.

From Czech Republic, June 2016.

From Finland, June 2016

Whoo-hoo there… Are you an early bird or a night owl?  
I’m neither, really. More like the owl on the right, both in the early morning and late in the evening!

Postcards for the Weekend 50: Patterns & Prints