Sabbat
The year's hinge — harvest in, dark owed its turn, and the dead close enough to set a place for.
These are associations the community holds, not settled fact — the more a reading is shared, the bolder it sits.
Samhain is one of the four Gaelic quarter days, and one of the genuinely old pieces of the Wheel. The Old Irish word Samain — usually read as "summer's end" — sits in medieval manuscripts as a fixed point in the herding year: cattle down off the hill, the harvest in, debts settled. Tales set on that night treat it as a hinge, where the rules slacken and the otherworld is an easy walk away.
Two things get overclaimed. There was never a god called Samhain; that is a Victorian misreading which refuses to die. And modern Hallowe'en is not an unbroken Gaelic rite but a braid — Irish and Scottish customs carried to North America, tangled with the church's All Hallows, and sold back to these islands with plastic pumpkins attached. The night is old; the Wheel that files it alongside seven others is a mid-twentieth-century arrangement.
None of that makes the date less useful. Practitioners keep it as the year's threshold: a plate left out, a name said aloud, a list of what is finished. Southern-hemisphere practitioners observe it around 30 April, six months across from the northern date.
Readings practitioners have offered, ordered by how many recognise them. Take what serves, leave the rest.
Carried forward
James Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890)
Frazer records a Welsh custom at the Hallowe’en fire in which every person present marked a stone and set it in the embers; whoever’s stone could not be found in the morning was reckoned not to see the year out. He collected several versions, and noted that the people keeping it no longer claimed to know why.
Carried forward
Common in contemporary practice
A plate set for the dead at supper, or a chair left empty. Practitioners differ on whether anyone comes; almost none of them stop doing it, which suggests the point was never entirely the answer to that question.
Credit what you carry. Much of this comes from living traditions, and some of it from traditions that are closed — held by particular peoples and not offered for general use. Where you know whose practice a reading came from, name them; where you don't, say that too.