A shared universe › All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day: two days for those we love · Español
All Saints’ Day, on 1 November, honours all the saints, including the ordinary people whose goodness nobody ever wrote down; All Souls’ Day, on 2 November, is for remembering and praying for everyone who has died. Together they are the days when many families visit a grave, take flowers, light a candle and say a name out loud.
The two feasts sit side by side, and that is why they are so often mixed up. All Saints’ Day (1 November), also called All Hallows, celebrates holiness. Not only the famous saints: the Church also speaks of the “saints next door”, people who lived faithfully in their families and at work. The feast began in the East in the fourth century; by the eighth century it was kept on 1 November in England and Ireland, and Rome adopted that date in the ninth.
All Souls’ Day (2 November) is the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed. It is a day of prayer for everyone who has died, and it says something simple and huge: death is not the end of the story. The date was fixed in the Western Church in 998, when Abbot Odilo of Cluny made it obligatory in the monasteries under him.
Put plainly: on the first day we look at those who have reached the light, and on the second we remember all our own, whoever they were, and hold them close.
Spain. 1 November is one of Spain’s national public holidays. In 2026 it falls on a Sunday, so many regions give Monday 2 November off instead. Families go to the cemetery, pray for their dead and leave fresh flowers. There are sweets that only appear these weeks: huesos de santo, little tubes of marzipan made to look like bones, and in Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands, panellets, small marzipan balls often covered in pine nuts. And there is theatre: José Zorrilla’s play Don Juan Tenorio, whose final act takes place among the dead, is staged around All Saints; in Seville it is now a tradition to see it inside San Fernando cemetery.
The Philippines. Here the days are called Undas, and millions of Filipinos visit cemeteries and memorial parks over the long weekend, so many that the authorities plan for it months ahead.
Louisiana. In the French Catholic culture of Louisiana, All Saints’ Day, La Toussaint, is the day for visiting your ancestors in the cemetery and decorating their graves.
Mexico. These same days are the heart of the Día de Muertos, with its altars and marigolds. It has its own page: the Day of the Dead.
Halloween is the first of the three days. Its name comes from All Hallows’ Eve, the evening of 31 October, the night before All Saints’, traditionally a time when the souls of the dead were said to return to their homes. Folklorists at the Library of Congress describe Halloween, All Saints’ and All Souls’ as one three-day festival known in English as Hallowmas, and trace Halloween’s customs back to the Celtic festival of Samhain in Ireland.
So the costumes and the pumpkins are not as far from the cemetery flowers as they seem. One night plays with fear; the two days after it answer with memory and hope.
Many people live far from where their loved ones are buried, or have no grave to visit at all: ashes scattered at sea, a body never found, a goodbye that happened in another country. Remembering does not need a place. A few ideas:
If this is the first year, be gentle with yourself. These days can arrive like a wave, and the days before are often harder than the day itself. You don’t have to do it as it has always been done. You can stay at home, go early, go with company or go on your own. There is more about this in the dates that hurt.
To write on a card, to send to someone who is missing a person today, or simply to say to yourself:
If you want to do something from where you are, you can light a star in A shared universe. Tap “Light your star”, choose “What weighs on me”, or “What I’m grateful for” if you want to give thanks for their life, and say that it shines for someone who is gone. Write up to 280 characters without names. It shines for seven days, and other people will keep you company with a few kind words.
The page a star for those you have lost is made for these very days. And if you want words for someone who is grieving, you will find them in condolence messages.