The great Bal Gangadhar Tilak was the author of The Arctic Home in the Vedas (1903), which traces back our history 6,000-8,000 years. He was an authority on Sanskrit, Gandhi’s spiritual father, and was jailed more than once by the British rulers. He postulated that the ancient Vedic ancestors must have lived in the circumpolar area because that was the only way of accounting for their oral tradition that the Sun disappeared around late October, stayed down for a number of months, and then came back a few months later. It was a story that could not be handed down for thousands of years unless it were based in something dramatic, threatening our very existence; i.e., a child living within the cruel conditions of the Arctic Circle, could not forget such an event.

The other half of the story implies that Halloween might have a similar origin. If on October 31, you and your young children were visiting Longyearbyen, Svalbard (78 deg. N), within the Arctic circle on the island of Spitsbergen, the sun would not come up the next day! To calm the children you might ask the inhabitants when it might be coming back, they would say February 14, celebrated in many European countries as well as in the US and Canada, as Valentine’s Day!