No, that was All Saints. All Saints was originally designed to honor the saints, those who had been beatified. Official saints, canonized by the Pope.
All Souls Day, celebrated the day after All Saints, was designed to honor everyone else who had died.
In some traditions, All Saints Day honors all the Christian dead, and All Souls Day honors those who have died in the past year. Those of you with excellent memories of your English major days may remember that Sir Gawain left for his adventure with the Green Knight on All Souls Day. Medieval audiences would have read a lot into that date of departure. As Sir Gawain leaves, his castle-mates would have been expecting to celebrate his life the following year.
All Souls' would develop into the kind of day that drove Martin Luther crazy. On All Souls' Day, people would be encouraged to spend money so that their loved ones would get out of purgatory sooner. According to medieval theology, a soul wasn't ready to go to Heaven right away, so everyone would have loved ones in purgatory.
In most Protestant churches, All Saints' and All Souls' have merged into one, and that makes sense to me. Still, my inner English major will always have a sense of these alternative liturgical calendars. I like having more to celebrate, more ways to remind myself that there's more to life than what occupies most of my time (work--both on the job and at my house). I like having holidays that remind me that we're only here for too brief a time. It helps me to treasure the fleeting moments that I have.
This week, I came across this blog post which posits that although these holidays of All Saints and All Souls were almost pushed to extinction post-Reformation, today they are back in much fuller force, a full fortnight of remembering our dead that culminates in various remembrance days around November 11 (Armistice Day, Veterans Day, Remembrance Day): "In many churches All Saints/All Souls and Remembrance Day are kept on two subsequent weekends, more because of practicalities of when services can be held than because anyone has intended to create a fortnight-long season of remembrance - but the effect is that we think more about death at this time of year, and for longer, than our medieval forebears did."
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