To Halloween, or Not to Halloween...

I love dramatic make-up and elaborate costumes and candlelit parties.  Small children dressed as bugs and cowboys and various animals make my heart puff up and my mouth grin.  There's just something about the silliness of it and the chance to pretend, to be an actor, to put on somebody (or something) else's shoes (or paws/antennae/whatever) that appeals to us.

But we don't do Halloween at our house.  Crazy, but true.  It's the second most celebrated holiday, after Numero Uno Christmas, and I'm not sure what determines its #2 standing other than cold hard cash.  I find that it's peddled hard, and the only holiday peddled harder is, you guessed it, Christmas.  Because they're the two where the cash is.  Christmas is a no-brainer, but when you think of costumes and makeup and candy and decorations, oh my!...you begin to see the dollar signs in H$LL$W$$N pretty quickly.  So, what are we thinking, skipping out on #2?  I mean, really.  I re-read this and think, "What a couple of joy-killing curmudgeons" (one of Jed's favorite words, by the way...use it in a FB post on his wall).

First, let me say that I do get it.  It's super fun for kids, to be sure.  Candy is scrumptious.  Dressing up is delightful.  Tradition is important and gratifying and memory-making.  When I was growing up, we didn't celebrate Halloween in my parents' house either.  I was always kind of bummed that I couldn't get the greatest costume out there and go out with all my friends, be part of the corporate festivities, and just have fun, for goodness' sake.  My parents would turn out all the lights and hide in the back of the house so no one would think we were home and knock on our door.  No joke, people.  They aren't puritanical weirdos, either.  They just felt strongly about Halloween. 

We don't go quite that far around here, mind you.  And we did do Harvest festivals when I was a kid, which I'm still contemplating.  Can I ask an honest question here?  I think I shall.  Is it old and tired to anyone else when the church copies exactly what the world's doing but calls it something else to make themselves feel better about it?  Oh goodness, I know I just stepped on a lot of toes!  I just stepped on my own toes.  I'm just thinking out loud and think it's a fair question.  Let's gingerly back away from this one for now, shall we?  Steady now...steady now...there.  Safe.  *dusting myself off*  Everybody OK? 

Tiny tree's fall foliage.

Now I have kids of my own, and one is age three, just the age where he could really start to get into it.  So I've been asking myself, "OK, what do I really think about all this?  What will we do?  And WHY?"  I don't do things just because that's the way it's been done.  I want a reason.  I want to dig deep.  What's in my spirit?  And I don't want to get all "weirdo-religious-girl" and legalistic about something, especially if it doesn't matter.  Enjoying Halloween festivities is not a sin, and I've already been through the phase where I did it just because I realized I could.  But that's not a good reason to do anything, so ponder I did.

I first considered that Halloween customs stem from pagan beginnings.  That's not necessarily enough to make it taboo, though, because Christmas and Easter are riddled with pagan custom.  I can trim a tree and hide Easter eggs with the best of them.  A friend of mine told me that, growing up in the Catholic Church (she's no longer Catholic), Halloween for her was understood as a time to show reverence for those who have gone before us and paid a price for where we are today in Christendom.  That's a great idea, and I'd never understood that component for Catholics.  But it isn't really Halloween, but the day after, All Saints' Day, in which they pay their respects.  And obviously, dressing up like a witch and going trick or treating isn't accomplishing that laudable goal.  The best way to honor those who've gone before us and paid a price is to live our own lives with the same fervor, successfully carrying the torch along our portion of the race.

So our decision ultimately boiled down to one simple thing:  fear.  Halloween compounds and celebrates and plays with fear.  Now, I would love to see my three-year-old son dressed up like a cowboy or a ninja or, don't judge, but he could pull it off, Angelina Jolie (Just trust me on this one!), because it would be silly and fun.  But if that's really all that important to me, I have 364 other days in which I can dress him up for silly good times.  But Halloween draws from its ancient Druid beginnings, oozing with superstition, fear, and witchcraft.  These things are all antithetical to my incredible God, the power of His presence, and the perfect love we have through Him, which casts out all fear.

Now I'm certainly not trying to preach a sermon.  But I have to say that even when I was bummed about not celebrating Halloween growing up, I always thought it was kind of cool that my parents had this standard and that they held the line and wouldn't cave and let us do it just because that's what many others do.  It gave me that feeling of being set apart.  A holiday consumed with vampires, ghouls, goblins, angry wandering souls, witches, eyeball stews, hexes, and curses is not my kind of holiday.  And I don't want to be violent about the Kingdom of God, as I am, and then have to reconcile what I teach my kids along those lines every day of the year with what we would seem to be celebrating on that one day, if we celebrated it.  My God does not give us a spirit of fear but of power and of love and of a sound mind.  Fear is our enemy.  I will only ever introduce to them the reality that it's under our feet, not something upon which to cast our flirtations.

So there you have it.  That's what we do at our house, and this is an abridged explanation of why.  On the other hand, though, we absorb the northeastern fall season into our lives with as much gusto as we can muster.  We do carve (happy) faces into pumpkins and pick apples and decorate with unique leaves and acorns.  We do eat candy (all year long, folks, I won't lie), and we do think it's fun to play dress-up.  But this is where we draw the line.  And just so you know, we have good friends that we love and respect who do celebrate Halloween, and we don't get mad at them and hope they have a great time.  Every family for itself!  That's the way it should be.

Have a great fall season, however you choose to enjoy it.