We're taking
Halloween back.

What the Church herself does across the three days, and what she asks of you. All Saints is a holy day of obligation; All Souls is one of the very few days in the year on which a priest may offer three Masses. Most of the rest is offered rather than required, and a good deal of it can be had simply by asking in time: First Vespers on the evening of the thirty-first, a Requiem sung in black vestments with the Dies Irae, a priest who will come out and bless the graves.

The devotional half of the season, kept at home and in the neighborhood rather than in church. For centuries children and the poor went from door to door on the eve of All Souls and offered prayers for a household's dead in exchange for a cake, which is where trick-or-treating comes from. Bonfires were lit on the hills. A face was cut into a turnip and set in the window, and in some places the bells were rung all night for the souls in purgatory. None of it was ever obligatory, which is most of why it was lost.

The dishes proper to each day, and how to make them: Irish barmbrack with the fortune-telling trinkets baked into it, pane coi santi that Tuscan bakers start two days ahead and score with a cross before it goes in the oven, pan de muerto with a toy skeleton hidden somewhere in the loaf. Most of it is ordinary baking with something strange built into the method.

What to pour, and when in the day to pour it. Cider goes by the bonfire on the thirty-first, something mulled is waiting when everyone comes back from the cemetery, and at the graveside itself the Mexican custom is hot chocolate.

What to read aloud, and what to tell from memory. The Golden Legend has one about fishermen who haul up a block of ice instead of a catch and hear a soul inside it asking for thirty Masses. Stingy Jack is here too, with the ember he carries, and the Danse Macabre, which came out of the plague years and set pope and king and ploughman in the same line of dancers.

That story carried the doctrine for centuries, and it still lands better than a definition does.

Things to do with the children, arranged in the order the day runs: the legend told before the knife comes out, apples bobbed for with initials cut into the skin, and on All Souls the photographs spread across the table while the family tree is filled in.

Somebody has to be the first one to do this, and for a year or two it feels like work nobody asked for. Then a child who sat at that table grows up and sets it himself, with his own children leaning over the same names, and by then no one remembers that it was ever started on purpose.

Short pieces that explain what you are already doing. Praying for the dead rests on a passage in II Maccabees; the almsgiving in Tobit is where trick-or-treating comes from; Ecclesiasticus 44 is the chapter to read aloud over the photographs. None of it is long, and it is what you will want when somebody asks why any of this is done.

What to say and when, so nobody has to improvise at a graveside or go hunting on a phone in the dark. The novenas for both feasts, the Rosary prayed for your own dead, the De Profundis, and the Eternal Rest in English and in Latin, which is short enough to learn by heart.

The two that belong to this week, and the conditions people most often miss. Between noon on the first of November and midnight on the second, a plenary indulgence may be gained every time you enter a church and pray for the dead. Every time: for those two days the Church suspends her own rule that one may be gained only once a day. A second runs across the octave, for visiting a cemetery.

All of it is applicable only to the holy souls. None of it can be kept for yourself.