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It's hard for me to write about Halloween, because my mother hates this holiday with the heat of a thousand suns. She considers it to be a pagan holiday and Against God. So not only did we have that against us, my sister and I also lived in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by our equally religious grandparents and aunts and uncles and corn. (And she will probably be mad that I am writing about her, but I must include her in order to explain my ambivalence about Halloween. Sorry, Ma. I love you.)
Though Ma did allow us to get costumes for Halloween, she usually took us to some sort of harvest festival occurring in the basement of a church, where we bobbed for apples and got candy without all the pagan. To this day, I've never dressed up as a witch or a goblin or a ghost or anything that would remind my mother of SATAN. Old habits die hard. And honestly? Rotting flesh is sort of gross.
So now, here I am with a four-year-old and a dear friend who lives for Halloween. My husband, although raised Catholic, has no such weirdness about pagan holidays, and we finally live in a neighborhood where children are bussed in from the inner city to enjoy our wide streets and generous bowls of candy.
Satan...candy...children...traditions...my mother's voice in my head...
You see how difficult this is?
The little angel has dressed up for Halloween and gone trick-or-treating every year. When we lived in the city, we usually took her to the business trick-or-treating instead of door-to-door, not because we didn't trust our neighbors, but because they usually didn't have any candy. There weren't a lot of kids in our neighborhood. Last year was our first suburban Halloween, and I was knocked over by the volume of kids, and PARENTS DRESSED UP, and full-on freak shows going on at the houses around me. People put some serious money and effort into Halloween in my suburb. It's going to be impossible to ignore.
But really, what is trick-or-treating? Going against pretty much everything you tell your kid. Going up to strangers' houses and asking for food. That is weird. And according to Wikipedia, it didn't start up seriously in America until the 1930s. Yeah, I know!
That said, it seems most people are way more down with the trick-or-treating part than the ghosts-and-spirits part. Charlotte writes:
Halloween is what you make of it. Today, our culture has made it into something it wasn't supposed to be. (In fact, for the last number of years, there are news reports that following Christmas, Halloween is now the number #2 best-selling holiday merchandise category, a fact that I find a little disturbing. I would feel much better if the number #2 seller was Easter, or perhaps, Valentine's Day.) The over-emphasis upon the gruesome, grotesque, and blatant, extreme occultism is wrong, as well as un-Christian and un-holy. As it is, I can barely stand to turn on the TV around Halloween because of all the disgusting occult-based movies. No wonder that humane societies now refuse to adopt out black cats and kittens around Halloween.
Bonnie takes my-mother-like offense to trick-or-treating as well as Halloween in general:
Perhaps it is not appropriate to practice a such questionable tradition and indoctrinate our children into it. Can we truly serve God by participating in a ritual (trick-or-treating) that has its origins in superstitious interactions with the dead and the appeasement of spirits that may be evil? Many people are confused or deceived about spirituality and the spiritual realm. Acceptance of a holiday that more or less validates spiritism may represent a capitulation to the occult and does not necessarily serve to educate about spiritual truth, even if it is participated in a way that does not overtly celebrate evil influence. Scripture exhorts us to be wary lest our actions cause another to stumble (Romans 15). This may be one of the most compelling arguments against participation in Halloween.
Apparently this whole pagan thing is really causing problems for some parents. Beth writes about a fight she had with her husband:
Ben informed me that he didn't want our children to go trick-or-treating. He feels it's a "pagan holiday" and only people who are up to no
