The Romantic.com

THE LEGENDS OF HALLOWEEN

submitted by: Sandra Richards

My romantic Halloween is every Halloween — it is my wedding anniversary.

There are two legends that surround Halloween that, I think, lend a very romantic air to the holiday. One is about the Queen of Heaven who has suffered the loss of her Consort. She loves and misses him so greatly that she enters the Land of the Dead to be with him and try to bring him to the Land of the Living once again.

The second legend is one my husband and I had read as the beginning of our wedding ceremony. It is about the King of Winter looking high and low for a wife. He finds a woman who, though she is dressed in rags and has her face half-covered in soot, has a quick, intelligent mind and a charming personality. He wants to marry her at once, but the King’s counselor’s are aghast at how she looks. So a test is devised. She must solve a riddle.

The woman is told she must come to the wedding neither clothed nor naked, neither sitting nor riding, neither alone nor with companions in neither day nor night. On the appointed day she came to the wedding wrapped only in a fishing net, sitting on a donkey with one foot dragging behind her in the dirt. She was surrounded by 24 wolves. The time of day was twilight.

My husband and I were married in a sunset ceremony, and we actually timed it so that we were saying our vows at twilight. Each twilight on Halloween we renew our vows privately and light our unity candle for the night.