There’s a part of me – a nostalgic, desperate part – that wants to recreate in adulthood the sense of time I had when I was a child. For as long as I can remember my life has been measured by the American school calendar, a curiosity anywhere outside our borders.

(A Danish guest at a family dinner a few weeks back was almost as shocked by this as by our systems of healthcare.)

Millions of my peers have happily (or begrudgingly) discarded this for a “grown up” calendar built around vacation days and sick leave. If I stop teaching, I’ll need to do the same. 

Grinches and overworked retail employees might point out that the “holiday cycle” is a euphemism for marketing campaigns. But that doesn’t matter to a child. An average child in the U.S. measures time in steadily increasing enchantments: the first day of school, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s; a buffer, and then Valentine’s Day, Easter, spring break, and the long languid freedom that characterizes our summer breaks. 

At some point this fades, and between the slow end of childhood and the dawn of parenthood, most holidays become strange: it feels a bit silly to celebrate them, but it feels grotesque to ignore them. I’ve made compromises with the minor ones: I’ll look for a sprig of green on Saint Patrick’s Day, give a solemn nod on Labor Day, think about trees on Earth Day, etc. – midnight passes, and I might feel a prick of guilt for my non-observance. 

I hadn’t heard of All Saints Day (“All Hallows”) and All Souls Day until comparatively late. I was in grad school, living alone for the first time in my life, and the idea of a “feast day” was new and Romantic. I wasn’t Catholic, and didn’t know the rules, so I took a literal interpretation: one day, I assumed, celebrates all the saints, the other celebrates all the souls that are now, have been, and ever shall be. 

I know a little more now. But I still like my first interpretation. Every “Allhallowtide” (Oct. 31 – Nov. 2) for the last four years, I’ve tried to “celebrate” these days in the awkward, private way I’m accustomed to with all the minor holidays. And I end up with an amalgamated mush of inward rituals: some confused prayer, some baffled reflection; once or twice, a piece of writing that never sees daylight. I take the days in their broadest possible meaning, transfixed by the sheer magnitude of that word “All.”

Questions arise. Doesn’t the “All” in “All Souls” supersede the “All” in “All Saints?” If you take the traditional, limited observance of All Souls to include only the souls of the faithful Catholic departed, doesn’t that encompass the saints, who must, in order to be saints, have died? Why the distinction – and why commemorate them as their own days to begin with?

Holidays – holy days – outwardly constrict the expressions of devotion. They do this in a way that even observers recognize as artificial. I was raised to understand, for instance, that to a believing Christian, every day is Easter; every day is Christmas. But these days – and in some traditions, entire seasons in preparation (Lent, Advent) – still have their place on the calendar. Some fundamentalists, and a few major sects like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, dismiss holidays altogether as superfluous (or worse); but the majority of people embrace and celebrate holidays which they recognize as, technically, “redundant.” 

I would rather have redundant holidays than none at all. Life is short, and the world is wide. 

Our ancestors lived at the mercy of the seasons. In most of the last 12,000 years, the cycles of harvest and planting were probably the most important things in the world. Civilization was impossible without them, and even the most remote urban elite were wracked with more anxiety about agriculture and natural disaster than most of us can imagine now. Seasonal changes, and the recurring holidays that commemorated them, were unbelievably significant. To be freed from this mode of life is a blessing and a curse.  

To have survived another cycle of seasons, another trip around the sun, and landed on the same day, in the face of all the vagaries and tribulations of the year, was and is a powerful feeling. No matter how much we’d like to abstract out the “meaning” of certain holidays from their position on the calendar, we can’t ultimately rid ourselves of the instinctual “rightness” of the connection between a fixed date and what it celebrates.

Even so: why only one day for “All Souls?” As I understood the day, and still do – as a day to honor and celebrate, literally, every human person – it seems to express a conception found, at least nominally, in most major religions, and in most generous secular attitudes (humanism et. al.). If every day is Easter, surely every day is All Souls Day. 

And it’s an impossible task, too, especially for 24 hours: the “All” covers, quite literally, the totality of human existence. 

I think it comes down to human weakness. As with religion, so with literature and art. We have vocabularies to express the infinite; we have access to registers of thought and experience which can hint at, or reach, heights of sublimity, ecstasy, super-human conceptions of life, and all the rest. We all – at least I hope – have experienced something like transcendence, and something like agape, an all-consuming, overpowering sensation of charity and respect and love for the whole human family; but we can’t maintain it. The noblest aims of art – to expand the self, to produce a deeper sense of love – run up against the same reality: we can never “stay” in one place. We can’t live in that frame of mind indefinitely. Some of us can stay in the heights for longer, and some of us (the “saints,” I suppose, “known and unknown”) are up there for most of the time. But everyone comes down. We get hungry, and we need things. Transcendence needs constant nourishment.  

Which means we need to take things in small pieces. We need to pace ourselves. And we need to repeat some things year after year. Every day is and ought to be All Souls Day – but most of us aren’t there yet.