Three-day vacation

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has proclaimed this Friday, Oct. 31 as a holiday. This is to give people a chance to celebrate All Souls and All Saints days in their respective hometowns. All Saints and All Souls are the two holidays that are celebrated in the cemeteries. You can’t celebrate it anywhere else. It is the two days of the year when the living spend the day with the departed.

The Philippine National Police are taking all the necessary precautions to insure that there will be no violent incidents during the celebration.

They have assigned security men whose duty will be to insure that the people who go to commemorate All Saints and All Souls days in the graveyards of their dearly departed do not carry any arms or alcoholic drinks. They will also make sure that there will be no unnecessary noise during the feast of the Dead.

Friday the day that President Macapagal-Arroyo has declared an extra holiday happens to be All Hallows Eve, popularly called Halloween, meaning the Eve of All Hallows. In old English, "hallows" meant a holy man or a saint. In 610, Pope Boniface IV converted the pagan Pantheon into a Christian church, dedicating it to all the martyrs. The All Saints festival that was originally commemorated on May 1 was transferred to November 1 in 834. It was the Americans who made the Halloween celebration popular in the Philippines. (The other celebration that they also introduced was Valentine’s Day.) That is why to this day, Halloween is generally celebrated in urban areas and the decorations to this day are generally American-made.

In the plush villages of Makati, Halloween is becoming like Christmas. The homes are generally decorated with the Halloween symbols – Jack-o’ lanterns, which were originally called Ignis Fatuus also "Will o’ the wisp" or "Friars lanthorn". Ignis Fatuus was originally a flame-like phosphorescence flitting over marshy ground due to the spontaneous combustion of gasses from decaying vegetable matter. This is what inspired the Jack o’ lanterns carved out of pumpkins that are now the main symbols of the Halloween celebration.

In the Makati villages, the homeowners have done something to extend the celebration to the less-privileged sector of our society. The children who reside in the villages do not go from house to house for the usual trick or treat. Instead they stay at home and hand out the goodies to the children of their gardeners, drivers, helpers and security guards. So it is the children of the workers that really enjoy the day.

All Saints Day was originally conceived not so much to honor all the known saints who have been assigned a day in the calendar, but those who precisely have been neglected or forgotten. All Souls is for all the departed souls. Both days are celebrated in the cemeteries and All Saints is generally the day when people start fixing the graves of their dearly departed for the All Souls commemoration.

With Halloween being declared a special holiday, we can safely say that from Friday to Sunday, there will be heavy traffic on all roads that lead to the cemeteries. A cemetery is every man’s ultimate destination. It is also the place that accepts all without asking questions.