This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Fet Gede falls on November 1 and 2, the same days as the Catholic All Saints and All Souls observances, and Haitian Vodou keeps it at two kinds of place at once, the cemetery and the household altar. Servitors dress in the Gede's colors, purple and black, sometimes adding sunglasses with one lens missing, a stock comic touch tied to Bawon Samdi, head of the Gede family of lwa. Rum steeped with hot peppers, kleren peze, is poured for the dead and drunk by the living who serve them; graves are cleaned, candles lit, and the cross shaped tomb of Bawon Samdi himself, when a community keeps one, becomes the day's central shrine. Possession by a Gede spirit at Fet Gede looks different from possession by most other lwa, the horse, the person possessed, staggers, curses, propositions the crowd, and mocks whatever the living take too seriously that year, sickness, poverty, sex, death itself. Vodou treats this frankness as instruction rather than disorder. Because Vodou has never required a single national liturgical calendar, observance varies by house, the local congregation built around a particular priest, priestess or family lineage, and by region, but the November dates and the address to the dead are constant enough that Fet Gede functions as Haitian Vodou's closest equivalent to a nationwide public feast, even without any centralized body to declare it one.