The first two days of November are the West's great season of the dead. All Saints on the first honours the whole company of the holy, known and unknown, and All Souls on the second prays for all the faithful departed; in Catholic countries the days are kept with candles and chrysanthemums on the graves, and in Poland the cemeteries on Zaduszki glow after dark with fields of small flames. Mexico's Dia de los Muertos spreads across the same two days, welcoming the dead home to ofrendas laid with marigolds, sugar skulls, photographs and the foods the dead loved, a celebration whose exuberance descends from pre Hispanic festivals of the dead that the colonial church's calendar absorbed rather than erased.
Slavic tradition keeps the same season as Dziady, the forefathers' eve, when food and drink were set out for the ancestors and fires lit to warm them, an observance the Belarusian and Polish lands kept in autumn around the turn of November and that Adam Mickiewicz's drama of the same name fixed in Polish literature. Rodnovery, the modern Slavic native faith revival, has taken the autumn Dziady back into practice.
Later in the month the lunar calendar usually brings the birthday of Guru Nanak, founder of Sikhism, celebrated at the full moon of Kartik with processions and continuous readings of the Guru Granth Sahib, and the Western church year ends as November closes: the feast of Christ the King falls on its last Sunday, and Advent begins at its edge.
Sources The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.) with Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead: The Day of the Dead in Mexico and BeyondStanley Brandes, The Encyclopaedia of SikhismHarbans Singh (editor-in-chief)