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The Festival of Spirits

The Festival of Lanterns honors and celebrates the dead, the spirits, and citizens alike. We commemorate their sacrifices and celebrate their memories. We laugh in the face of death. Every year around the end of summer, the Samuin Tree begins to wilt. Its pumpkins rot and fall, releasing their spores into the cool evening night. But the blooms on this tree are ghastly, for its pumpkin fruit are carved in the shape of the dead, and its spores are the burning flames of the spirits. These spirit flames wander the land, lost without their pumpkins to call home. But in honor of the dead, the local townsfolk open their village to the spirits. It is then that the townsfolk use dying light of the spirits to celebrate with them during the Festival of Lanterns and commemorate their lives. When the Festival is over, the spirits burn with a bright flame once more, and are returned to the Samuin tree, now in bloom with a new harvest of pumpkin lanterns, to keep lit all year round.