The Night of Dziady

Aunt Bramble
Wyrdlore Society

It is Halloween night, and the lanterns are glowing all down the lane, so this is a good night for a story about visitors. Long ago, in the villages of Poland and Belarus and Lithuania, people kept a custom called Dziady, which means something like 'the grandfathers' or 'the forefathers'. Twice a year, when the seasons turned, families remembered everyone in their family who had died, going back and back, further than anyone could count.

They did it kindly. They swept the graves clean and pulled the weeds away, and they lit a little candle there for each person they remembered, so the whole graveyard glimmered like a sky full of small stars. Then they went home for supper, and they laid the table with one extra place, right at the head of it, for the family who could not come themselves. The door was left a little open too, in case someone wanted to step in out of the cold.

Before anyone else ate, a bit of food went down for the ancestors first, a spoonful of this and a crust of that, set quietly at the edge of the table. Bread, mostly, and something warm to drink. In some villages an old man would come round, a kind of wandering storyteller, and he would sing the names of the dead so that nobody was forgotten, and the family would answer back, almost like a conversation carried on from a long way off.

Nobody thought any of this was frightening. The dead were guests that night, not strangers, and everybody wanted them to feel welcome and warm and fed, the way you would want anyone you loved to feel, if they had come a long way to see you.

When supper was over, the little candles in the graveyard were left to burn themselves all the way down, keeping watch quietly in the dark, long after everyone else had gone home to bed.

Aunt Bramble keeps the Society's stories for its smallest members. She has never been anywhere in a hurry, owns a very old coat with very deep pockets, and holds that a story does not have to be tidy to be true.

The rest of the season is gathered in Nights of the Dead.