How to Host an Ancestor Feast
We're entering a special time of year for connecting to the spirit world
Why are you still here? When you look back at your lineage, this can be an awe-inspiring question. What suffering did your forebears endure so that you can be here today? What gifts did they embed in your bones so the people who made you could survive? Halloween, Samhain (pronounced saa-wn), and All Souls’ Day are soon approaching. This is a threshold time, when the veil is thin, meaning the barrier between the earth and the spiritual realm is thinner than usual. Because the spiritual realm is easier to contact, it is a great time of year for honoring your ancestors.
As I mentioned last week, one aspect of our culture that we have lost are ongoing ways to honor our ancestors after they have died. Most people think of ancestors as those we share blood/genetics with, but I prefer a broader definition that includes those who raised or nurtured us, but do not share genetics and those with whom we share a spiritual or life path. Building a connection to my ancestors has been a great source of support in my life. I started to connect with my ancestors through a sort of guided visualization with Lindsay Sudeikis from Omnia Sancta and connected to them through my imagination. Am I actually receiving messages from my ancestors or just connecting to my own needs and desires and more open to giving myself the permission because I think the message came from my ancestors? I have no idea. Either way, messages from my ancestors have helped me in both simple and more intense situations. They advised me to own my desire to wear a flower crown and just wear the damn flower crown. They also recognized the weight on my shoulders during COVID and reminded me that there are human and non-human forces that can help me carry that weight.
Building a connection with your ancestors can be much simpler than that. It can be creating a family photo album that you look through often, creating a table or wall with ancestral photos, creating a family recipe book, reciting a list of your beloved dead with prayers before bed, leaving food offerings routinely. Even if you don’t know the names of your ancestors, sometimes amazing information about your ancestors flows your way when your attention goes toward them. Last year, I started trying to gather family recipes. When I did, my aunt sent me some family recipes, which included the email address of my paternal grandmother’s sister. I contacted her and she sent me a treasure trove of information about part of the family I knew very little about. If you are interested in connecting to your ancestors, two authors I highly recommend are
and Daniel Foor. There are as many ways to build relationships with your ancestors or celebrate them as you can dream up. In my opinion, an ancestor feast is one of the most fun. The methods I discuss below are meant as inspiration rather than rules, so use them as a jumping off point to make something personal for you and your family rather than feeling constricted by trying to “do it right”.How do you host an ancestor feast? An easy place to start is to take some inspiration from the movie Coco (hat tip to
for calling my attention to Coco as inspiration). Gather photos and stories of your ancestors and ask guests to do the same. We made a playlist that included favorite songs of our ancestors and asked others to contribute too. Prepare favorite foods of your ancestors or if those aren’t known, prepare traditional foods from their homelands. It can be fun and helpful to designate a few other guests to bring foods representing their ancestors as well. For example, the date I selected last year was, coincidentally, the anniversary of the death of a dear friend’s mom, so she seemed like a natural person to ask to make a dish to honor her mother.
When grocery shopping for the foods you will prepare, it is helpful to go with a plan that can also be adjusted as you listen to your intuition. Now is the time to let go of strict dietary restrictions or ideas about “good” food versus “bad” food and connect, eat, and celebrate as your ancestors would have. If your grandfather loved Cheetos, get some darn Cheetos. If you eat a low-carb diet, but great-grandma Brunhilde was known for her brownies, make like Elsa, let it go, and eat some brownies that night.
My grandfather died last year, so I wanted to honor my grandfather and his lineage. I knew a favorite dessert (Glorified Rice) and that his parents had made fruit wines, so I included them, but no one had a strong recommendation on his favorite entrees, so I chose to cook some traditional German food that, I hope, would have been familiar to his ancestors. That being said, when you are shopping for your feast, you may find that you have an intense, unexpected craving, or feel pulled to a certain food. It is worth listening to those intuitive messages and trying to incorporate those foods if you can.
Clean the house before you cook (those who know me well know that clean is a relative term, but for the ancestors I really do my best) and cleanse the energy of the house as well. I do this by opening windows and doors and walking the perimeter of all of the room burning cedar to spread the smoke. Different traditions have different herbs they prefer to burn, many use sage, some use rosemary. If energy cleansing is just too much woo for you, your ancestors would rather you host a feast in a way that fits you rather than forgo it because it’s too weird. Similarly, when preparing food for your ancestors, the traditional practice is you don’t taste the food while you are preparing it until you have offered it to your ancestors, so if you cook this way, you trust your ancestors to guide your hands as you prepare the food and that’s part of the adventure.
Fire makes a wonderful centerpiece for an ancestor feast. First, it’s just great fun to gather around a fire–eating, drinking, laughing, sharing stories, singing and dancing. It’s also very similar to the ways our ancestors would have gathered with each other. Last year, it was very rainy, so we had to adapt and bring our feast into the house and use our wood stove instead. Once again, don’t let your attachment to how it “should” be or some idea about ritual purity ruin the experience for yourself or others, adapt to the realities of the day.
I lit the fire to mark the beginning of the feast and made some remarks of welcome, about why I gathered everyone for this kind of celebration, about the family members who became ancestors that year. This year, I might write or share a prayer. If you have enough friends and family attending, it can be helpful and kind of an honorary title to nominate someone to be the fire tender. When the fire is burning well, make offerings of each type of food to the fire. I asked the cooks to make an offering and share a little about why they chose the food and the ancestor who inspired the food choice. Burning the food allows it to reach into the spirit realm. In an indoor fire, keep those offerings quite small. If you don’t have a fire, leaving offerings at an empty seat at the table and then placing them outside is another way to share offerings with the spirit realm. As a general rule, the offerings we make to our ancestors, to the spirits, to the land are more meaningful to them and to us if they come with a good story that shows that either some physical effort was put into creating that offering or some mental effort was put into thinking about what this being would want and how to obtain it.
This is really meant to be a fun party. It is certainly a time to miss those who are gone, but generally more a time to share stories of love, humor, praise, rather than dwelling on how those in your family have done you or others wrong. Last year, I was coming down with a bit of a bug, but this year, I’m hoping that between staying healthy and kids being a year older that we can stay up late and really make it a raucous affair. Since last year, I have learned the story of one of my great-great grandmother’s early life and how she decided to immigrate. I am also learning how to take folktales from the page back to oral storytelling, so I hope my friends and family will indulge me as I incorporate that as well.
Hosting an ancestor feast is an excellent way to dip your toe into seasonal celebrations (celebrations that mark the cycles of the year roughly every six weeks). It is one way to start building a relationship with your beloved dead. These celebrations also open our eyes to the love and loss we share with our friends and family that we often don’t have the opportunity to acknowledge. I truly hope you adopt at least one of the ideas for connecting with your ancestors and keep me updated on how it goes. Please share your questions or personal experience with ancestor feasts and honoring the dead in the comments.