Only on rare occasions does the feast of St. Martin fall on a Sunday. Father Bakker ran out of hosts and had to return for a new batch several times before the multitude was fed. Instead of the usual sparse attendance the church was half full today. It was a family mass with the children’s choir. The children paraded in with their jack o’lanterns. After dark they went out door to door singing a Saint Martin song for a treat. Our Halloween has its origin from this earlier tradition.
In the book “The Mastmakers’ Daughters” you’ll find the following excerpt of what the German mastmaker daughter writes to her oldest son of what she experienced on St. Martin in 1961:
Rennie saw mothers push their small children with their jack o’ lanterns into stores while they stood outside ready with the bags for the treats the kids were to bring out.
She overheard a mother ask her little boy: “Mehr het er disch nit jejouwe?” (Cologne dialect: “That’s all he gave you?”).
One mother stopped at the horse butcher with her child carrying a jack o’lantern in the shape of a pig. Only after the butcher’s daughter got her to sing a St. Martin song did she get a slice
of sausage. Rennie shows that somewhere she still has a sense of humor when she comments: “Das war nett. He, ich wollt ich hätt’n Schluck Bier”. (“That was fun, hey, I just wished I could
have a drink of beer”).
It’s another bright crisp day. Last night my sister and Herman asked me over for dinner. I had coffee with Evelyn after mass. The below picture of the two girls was taken at my nephew’s home. where I had dinner and heard the neighborhood kids sing their Saint Martin songs.