How to Celebrate Samhain at Home: a simple evening for the 31st

You can mark Samhain without a coven or a cupboard full of kit. A candle will do it, given a quiet half hour and a bit of honesty about the year you've just had. What follows is a plain evening for the 31st that you can actually follow, written for people who have never done anything like it.

How to celebrate Samhain is a question people tend to ask quietly, slightly sideways, as if they might be laughed at. You will not be. Lighting a candle for someone you miss as the year goes dark is about as ordinary as a thing gets.

When

The evening of 31 October, from sunset. Some people carry on into 1 November.

Say it

SOW-in (the first half rhymes with cow)

How long

Ten minutes, an hour or a whole evening. All three count.

The bare minimum

One candle, one name said out loud

The themes

Remembering the dead, letting the old year go, settling in for winter

If you want the background first, our guide to what Samhain actually is and how it became Halloween covers the history, and the Wheel of the Year shows where it sits among the other seven festivals. This piece is the practical one.

What is old and what is new

A lot of what gets written about Samhain claims every part of it is thousands of years old. The festival itself is genuinely old. Medieval Irish texts name Samhain as the start of winter and a time of gatherings, feasting and strange goings on. What they don't give us is a ritual to follow. Nobody wrote down an ancient Samhain ceremony. The historian Ronald Hutton, whose book The Stations of the Sun is the standard work on British calendar customs, is careful on exactly this point: the old tales show gatherings and feasting, but no religious rite.

Here is the short version.

The old rows are folk custom, written down over the last few hundred years. The modern ones are pagan practice, mostly from the last seventy years or so, and they're none the worse for it. A thing doesn't have to be ancient to be worth doing.

What you need, and what you do not

We run a shop, so you might expect a long list here. It's a short one. You can do all of this with what's already in your kitchen. A few well-chosen things just make it feel more like an occasion and less like a power cut.

If you do want to buy one thing, make it candles you like the look of. Black and white are the usual Samhain pair among modern witches, black for the dark half of the year and for letting go, white for remembrance. Our spell and ritual candles are mostly small ones that burn down in an evening, and the wider spellwork essentials collection has the dishes, bells, cloths and bits that go round them.

• Black spell candles Twelve small ones. For the dark half of the year and the letting go. See the candles
• White spell candles For remembrance. One for each person, if you like. See the candles
• Life Death Rebirth altar cloth The whole wheel of the year on it. Turns a shelf into a place. See the cloth
• Three Moon brass bell One ring to start, one to finish. See the bell

Setting a simple Samhain altar

Altar is a big word for what is usually a windowsill, a shelf or the end of the sideboard. All it means is a small space you've cleared on purpose. Clearing it is half the point. It tells you that tonight isn't an ordinary telly night.

What traditionally goes on it

A cloth to mark the space out. A dark one suits the season. A clean tea towel will do, and there are proper ones in altar cloths and bells.

Candles. One is enough. Black and white together if you want the traditional pair, or whatever catches your eye in the wider candles range.

The people you're remembering. Photographs, or something that belonged to them. Pets count. Of course they do.

Something from the harvest. Apples above all, then nuts, a small pumpkin or squash, a few leaves from outside. If you fancy something more decorative, the Samhain and Halloween shop is where we keep the seasonal pieces.

Something for them. A glass of water, or a small measure of whatever they drank.

That's a complete altar. Some people add a scent. Frankincense, myrrh and sandalwood all suit the season, and there are cones, smudge sticks and holders in incense, smudge and cleansing. Some add a bell, rung once to begin and once to end, which sounds theatrical until you find it works rather well as a full stop.

The evening itself, step by step

Here is the whole thing in order. Read it through, then decide how much of it you're doing. Nobody is marking you.

1. Clear the space and your head. Tidy the surface, put your phone in another room, and turn the big light off. If trick-or-treaters are likely, put the bowl of sweets on the step.
2. Light the candle. Do it deliberately. Say something if you want to, even if it's only "right then".
3. Name your dead. Out loud, one at a time. Look at the photographs. Say one true thing about each person: what they cooked, what they were like in a car, the phrase they overused. If you only do one step properly, do this one.
4. Look back over the year. What went well since last autumn, and what have you had enough of?
5. Write down what you're putting down. A habit, a grudge, a version of events you keep replaying. Nobody else will read it.
6. Burn it, or let it go another way. In a fireproof dish, or one of the flame-free ways further down.
7. Eat or drink something. An apple, a slice of brack, a cup of tea. It brings you back into the room.
8. Finish properly. Say thank you and goodnight to the people you named. Snuff the candle. Put the big light back on.

Step 6 is the only one that can go wrong in a way that involves the fire brigade, so one short note before we go on.

If you have ten minutes

Steps 2, 3 and 8. Light a candle, say their names and one true thing about each, sit for as long as the feeling lasts, say goodnight. You can do this at the kitchen table with your coat still on.

If you have an hour

All eight steps, at an easy pace. Most of the hour will be the writing, because it's harder than it sounds to be honest with a biro.

If you have the whole evening

Cook. Make the meal the ritual: colcannon, a place laid for whoever is missing, the candle on the table rather than the shelf. Do the writing after the washing up, then get the cards or the apple peel out and finish with something daft. The old Halloween was never solemn all the way through.

Say one true thing about each person: what they cooked, what they were like in a car, the phrase they overused.

Remembering the dead, and the extra place

This is one of the best documented parts of the season, and the best of the evidence is Irish. Rose Shaw, writing about County Tyrone in 1931, describes All Souls' Eve there: the floor swept, a good fire put down, the family off to bed early, the door left unlatched and a bowl of spring water on the table, so that any relative who had died might find a place prepared at their own fireside. Elsewhere in Ireland the seats nearest the hearth, the best in the house, were left free for them.

There's nothing frightening in it. These were your own people, coming home for the night, and you made them welcome.

So the extra place at the table has real roots. Lay it as you would for a guest: plate, cutlery, glass. Put a little of the meal on it if that feels right, or leave it empty.

None of which is a reason not to do it. A meal eaten in silence with a place laid for someone you miss gets to you, whoever thought of it. If a whole silent meal sounds like a lot, try five minutes of quiet at the start and then talk about them for the rest of it, which is remembering as well.

A thing doesn't have to be ancient to be worth doing.

Letting go: writing it down and burning it

This part is modern, and we won't pretend otherwise, though it borrows its logic from the old fires. Samhain bonfires were lit to protect and to cleanse, and in parts of Scotland burning torches were carried round houses and fields to keep them safe through the winter. A scrap of paper in a saucepan is the flat-sized descendant of that.

It works best when you're specific. "Negativity" is too vague to burn. "Checking my phone before I'm out of bed" or "still being cross with my sister about the caravan" is something you can actually put down. Write it, read it once, fold it away from you, light it from the candle, and drop it in the dish. When the ash is cold, tip it outside.

If you'd rather keep a record than destroy one, do both halves. Burn the list of what you're dropping, and write what you're taking into winter in a book you'll still have next year. Any notebook does it. If you want one that deserves the job, that's what journals and grimoires are for, and a black Book of Shadows is the traditional shape of it.

A bit of fortune telling

If any part of tonight is properly traditional, it is this. For centuries Halloween was the fortune telling night of the year, and most of it was about who you were going to marry.

Irish schoolchildren collecting local customs in the 1930s described the same sort of evening: bobbing for apples in a tub, snapping at one swinging on a string, peeling an apple in one long strip, and a blindfold game with saucers of water, clay and a ring. The peel, thrown over the shoulder, was said to fall in the shape of a future sweetheart's initial. You need no equipment and no belief for it. It's just a good game, which is why it lasted.

The modern equivalents are cards, pendulums and stones. Pulling a single tarot card for the year ahead, and writing down what you make of it, is a good way to close the evening. Treat it as a prompt for thinking rather than a weather forecast. There are beginner-friendly decks in tarot and oracle, and if cards feel like a lot to learn, a pendulum or a bag of runes is simpler to pick up.

What to eat and drink

Food is the easiest way into this night, especially if you live with people who'd rather not sit in the dark with you. All of these are real, recorded Halloween foods.

• Apples In everything. Bobbed for, hung on strings, peeled for fortunes, roasted and mashed into warm ale or milk as a drink called lamb's wool.
• Soul cakes English. Souling, the custom they belong to, is recorded from the early 1500s. Small spiced cakes with currants, often marked with a cross, given to "soulers" who went door to door around All Souls offering prayers for the dead in return. John Aubrey noted heaps of them set out in Shropshire houses in the 1680s, and the custom hung on in Cheshire, Shropshire and Staffordshire into the twentieth century.
• Colcannon Irish. Mashed potato with kale or cabbage, a well of melted butter in the middle. The traditional Halloween supper, and sometimes served with a ring or a coin hidden in it.
• Barmbrack Irish fruit loaf, and a fortune telling game in its own right. The ring meant marriage within the year and a bean meant good fortune. The pea, the rag and the stick meant rather less welcome things. Shop-bought bracks with charms in were already common by the later 1800s. If you can't find a brack, a buttered tea loaf is a close cousin.
• Nuts Hazelnuts and chestnuts, for eating and for burning in pairs, as above.

If you're hiding anything in food, wrap it in baking paper and tell everybody at the table before they bite down. The old custom didn't come with a dentist.

With children, or sceptical housemates

With children, lead with the food and the games. Bob for apples, do the apple peel, bake soul cakes and mark the crosses. Then get the photographs out and tell them about the people in them: their great-grandad's terrible jokes, the dog you had before they were born. Keep the candle up high, do any burning yourself, and let them blow the candle out at the end, which is the bit they'll remember.

And if you'd simply rather nobody knew, a single candle on a windowsill on the 31st looks like nothing more than a nice candle.

No kit, and no flame

With no kit at all: go outside at dusk. Walk round the block and notice that the year has turned. Come in, put the kettle on, say their names over the tea. Write your list on the back of an envelope, tear it into small pieces and put it in the outside bin. Eat an apple. That's a complete Samhain and it cost you nothing, which we say as people with a shop to run.

If you can't burn anything, as in a lot of rented flats and student rooms, there is a stand-in for every flame in this article.

• For the candle: a battery tealight or a lamp with a warm bulb. Turning every other light off matters more than what the one light is.
• For the burning: tear the paper up small and bin it outside. Or write it in washable pen and hold it under the cold tap until the words run, which is oddly satisfying. Or bury it in a plant pot.
• For the smell of the season without smoke: wax melts. Most burners use a tealight underneath, so for a truly flame-free room you want an electric warmer. Our All Hallows Eve melts are pumpkin spice with black tourmaline chips in.

The flame is lovely, but what you're really after is the quiet half hour, and a battery tealight gives you that just as well.

Common questions

One last thing. You cannot get this wrong. If you lit the candle and thought of them, that was it.