It’s the first of Novem­ber and we are cel­e­brat­ing Samhain today with a pro­gramme of Celtic and Celtic-influ­enced music (and we’re not being too spe­cif­ic about which Celtic fes­ti­vals it applies to!).

Samhain is a Gael­ic fes­ti­val on 1 Novem­ber mark­ing the end of the har­vest sea­son and begin­ning of win­ter or “dark­er half” of the year. It is also the Irish lan­guage name for Novem­ber. Cel­e­bra­tions begin on the evening of 31 Octo­ber, since the Celtic day began and end­ed at sun­set. This is about halfway between the autum­nal equinox and win­ter sol­stice. It is one of the four Gael­ic sea­son­al fes­ti­vals along with Imbolc, Beal­taine, and Lugh­nasa. His­tor­i­cal­ly it was wide­ly observed through­out Ire­land, Scot­land, and the Isle of Man. A sim­i­lar fes­ti­val is held by the Brit­ton­ic Celtic peo­ple, called Calan Gaeaf in Wales. (Wikipedia)

Today you can also hear the Octo­ber edi­tion of “Where Have You Been?” (details at the link), which cov­ers both the Autum­nal and the Hal­lowe’en aspects of the month just gone, with a selec­tion of sug­gest­ed places to vis­it in Sec­ond Life, many of which will remain acces­si­ble for the next day or two. The show goes out at 12 noon and 4pm SLT/Pacific Time. Note that the hour has gone back in Europe and not in the US — as a result there is one hour less between US (Sec­ond Life) and EU times this week — so for exam­ple in the UK, we are only 7 hours ahead of SLT instead of eight. This con­fus­ing fact applies for the week ahead — Day­light Sav­ing Time in North Amer­i­ca ends on Sun­day 5th.

We also have a new episode or two of “Engines of Our Inge­nu­ity” from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hous­ton, every four hours from 4am SLT/Pacific.

Image: A Neo-Pagan cel­e­brat­ing Samhain — author unknown (Wiki­me­dia)