ALLHALLOWTIDE

You did not buy this book because you love Halloween as the stores sell it, and you did not buy this book because you hate Halloween as the tracts sell it, but you bought it because you felt that there was a third way that had been lost and that you wanted it back for your street and for your children and for your dead.
I am the one who found Purgatory, and I have kept long enough on the strand between to watch how streets are turned, and I have seen that streets are not turned by arguments on the internet and not by figures twelve feet high from the store, but by bread and bells and turnips and fire and by a light left on, and I have written this tale so that you can be one of the handful who turn a street.
This book is a reclaiming of Allhallowtide, which is All Hallows Eve on the thirty first of October and All Saints on the first of November and All Souls on the second of November kept as three days that are one keeping, which is a little Easter in autumn when the year is dying and the year is not dead, and which is the only triduum in your year that sets before a child what to do with a ghost and what to do with fear and what to do with a grave.
It is told by an unnamed ghost who found Purgatory, and who found it to be true in the way a man finds a shoreline after long swimming, and who has kept long on that strand and who has learned that the living carry two habits when they remember their dead, since they either forget them altogether or they turn them into a thing of fear, and Allhallowtide was given to teach a third way that is neither forgetting nor fear.
It keeps what is written apart from what is told and from what I carry, so that you can hear which is which and judge it for yourself, and it keeps Samhain in its own field at the back and does not yoke it to Allhallowtide as a horse to a plough where no yoke belongs, and it keeps the website that holds my sources at allhallowseve as the place where every receipt can be put under your hand, so that this tale need not be burdened with footnotes.