The Halloween Debate

I guess it's that time again. You know, the annual debate about whether or not Christians should be involved with Halloween. Many churches offer alternatives to "trick or treat" and are careful not to call it anything "Halloweeny". You've seen them. "Harvest Festival" or the like. In most cases, wearing costumes is fine, but not anything "demonic" or "pagan". Some insist on biblical characters. (Go ahead ... find an "Abraham" costume at your local KMart.) Individuals take it farther. No decorations. At least no "demonic" things, like ghosts, skeletons, spiders, vampires, or some such. And then there are the origins of Halloween to consider. Lighted, carved pumpkins were put out to scare away evil spirits, so they're definitely wrong for Christians to use. Or is that accurate?

Halloween itself has its origins in Celtic fire festivals and druid religions. It was originally Samhain, the beginning of "the dark time" in ancient days. It was considered an "ambiguous" time for spirits who could, at this time, go between the world of the dead and the world of the living. The Roman Catholic Church couldn't get its people to stop celebrating it, so they modified it. Instead of a celebration of darkness, they called it "All Saints Day", a celebration of the saints who had gone before. Also called "All Hallows Eve", it was shortened to "Hallow E'en" and then to today's "Halloween". In America, the event wasn't observed before the late 1800's when Irish farmers immigrated to the U.S. Before that, the influence of Puritan tradition prevented its observation. (The Puritans didn't allow the celebration of Christmas, either.) So Americans really didn't get into Halloween until the 20th century.

The practice of "trick or treating" came from a middle ages practice in which poor people would go door to door and receive food in return for prayers for the dead on All Saints Day. The practice of wearing costumes didn't seem to become a practice until the 1930's in America. And the idea of "trick" -- the threat that "if you don't give me a treat, I'll do something bad" -- didn't seem to really occur anywhere prior to America's version of it, and not until the 1950's. In other countries, children would be required to do a trick such as sing a song, do a card trick, tell a joke, and other such things to receive their treat.

Here it is, thousands of years past anything that resembles the origins of so many of the ideas that are incorporated into today's Halloween. And I suppose it's a product of my poor upbringing, but I just don't get the reason for the debate. When I was growing up, we would wear costumes and go house to house and say, "Trick or treat", but it never occurred to us that "trick" indicated a prank. It was just what we said. Some of the "bad kids" would TP a house or throw eggs, but those were the fringes, not the mainstream. The costumes I remember most were certainly evil, I suppose. One year my brother and I built a robot costume out of boxes. Surely that's demonic. And my most memorable (because it was my most embarrassing) was the year I went as a sack of potatoes. Truly evil, I'm sure. I was never informed that Satan was most powerful on this particular evening. I was never taught that real witchcraft and evil spirits were the focus of this event. My poor parents seemed to think that witches were ultimately fictional and God ruled the universe, and they passed that uninformed idea on to me.

Should Christians allow their children to dress up as princesses and Spiderman and visit the neighborhood collecting candy and treats? My abysmal education would say, "Why not?", but you need to "vote your conscience". I'm not here to pass judgment on the servant of another. Whatever is not of faith for you is sin. As for me, the mere suggestion that Satan actually rules at some point in time is too terrifying to contemplate. I have to believe in a Sovereign God or life for me would be intolerable. Besides, I kind of like the idea that God can take something that supposedly belongs to Satan (like Samhain) and redeem it for something good.