Thoughts on Halloween…We DID and now we DON’T

The Lord has changed a lot of things in my life since he brought us to our current church home. We were looking for a school for the Ladybug because kindergarten was looming and the thought of public school was keeping me up long into the night in silent tears. (This is not a post on school choice–that’s just the truth of where we were then.) So we found a church that had a school and Mr. Fix-It wisely suggested that we actually attend the church a few times before deciding to send our kiddos to their school.  So we sent the kiddos to VBS that year and I would normally say “the rest was history” but actually, that was just the very beginning! We found a church home and our walk with the Lord has become a journey I would never have imagined.

What does this have to do with Halloween? Our church as a body doesn’t celebrate Halloween. And that first year was the first time I’d ever run into anything like that before.

We always dressed up when I was a kid. We had dressed up our crew (and they looked darn cute too!) and taken them out for candy along Main Street before. The preschool that the Ladybug had attended had done Halloween costume day and the Catholic school run by my childhood church had done costumes as well. I had never even thought to question it–other than the fact that I’m not a fan of horror movies and zombies and all that stuff. But that was just a personal preference, not a moral statement on my part. One of the best parties my roommate and I hosted in college was a Halloween party with costumes! (Evidence of a misspent youth…)

So I had never been in any environment that questioned the validity of Halloween as “just all in fun.”

Until now.

Much like everything else in my Christian walk, I didn’t come to my current understanding overnight. It was a process of absorbing something new, thinking about it, mulling over it…examining everything around me through this new lens of consideration…

We  didn’t flip a switch that first Halloween in a new church and say, “We don’t celebrate Halloween any more, it’s the devil’s holiday!” or anything like that. We just sort of…didn’t do it. The kids didn’t celebrate it at their school, so there was no pressure there. And we don’t get any Trick-or-Treaters out where we live so there was no pressure there. We just decided to stay home from the Main Street celebration and the whole thing passed quietly.

And honestly, it was kind of nice not to have to worry about one. more. thing. at the time.

The next year it was kinda the same. Our lifestyle didn’t include a lot exposure to it so it just sort of drifted by without much thought and since I’m not really into that ghost and ghoul sort of stuff it was no big deal. It wasn’t a holiday we went all out for anyway. Besides, I do love all things Fall and Harvest and we had plenty of fun decorating with pumpkins and mums and straw bales and getting ready for Thanksgiving, without any need for bats or spiders or spooky stuff.

Last year our kiddos came home from school saying that Halloween was evil and it was the Devil’s birthday.

Whoa!

That was a shock to my system, let me tell ya! Pretty much our whole family participates (I think “celebrates” is the wrong word) in Halloween and no one was celebrating the Devil’s birthday. (And to be Biblical, the Devil doesn’t have a birthday that we know of.)

That’s when I realized that while I was busy being busy and stewing on this new concept of NO HALLOWEEN in the back of my mind, our crew was out there running counter-clockwise to their whole world without any home guidance, absorbing whatever they captured from school and classmates.

Much like everything else in life–if I didn’t give them our position, the world around them would give them its position. For good or bad.

So I took another look at Halloween, with about 2 years of non-committal distance and a lot more Bible under my belt, and here’s what I saw…

• We don’t celebrate Hanukkah, Ramadan, Summer Solstice, or All Hallows Eve and All Saints Day. The fact that the day of Halloween is, was, or might be a holiday for someone else should have nothing to do with whether or not we participate.
• A lot of people mentioned the historic religious affiliations of the holiday when ‘defending’ it, but the only people I came across who expressed any actual affiliation with a religious celebration in conjunction with Halloween were actually pagans and witches (self-proclaimed, I’m not being facetious.).
• Our kiddos like to play dress up and costumes and pretend and I don’t see anything wrong with it.
• Our kiddos love candy just as much as any other kids.
• The idea that our children get a day just to dress up and expect candy to be handed out from complete strangers for absolutely no reason at all runs counter to all the maturity and responsibility we are trying to instill in them. Not to mention the good eating habits part! {smile}

Here’s what else I saw…

• Children acting rude, bold, greedy, and ungrateful regarding candy.
• Children and pre-teens in highly inappropriate costumes that I hope they don’t really understand.
• Children and adults dressed up and pretending to be things that represent evil incarnate–and I don’t just mean to us. No one dressing up “for fun” on Halloween thinks the Grime Reaper is a nice guy with a bad rap. They chose that costume on purpose to represent evil, scariness, being the bad guy, and a host of other dark things. Devils, evil spirits, witches and goblins, axe murders, zombies and mummies, vampires and ghouls…folks pick these things because the “fun” of Halloween is in being spooky, scary, evil, dark, bloody, and bad.

And here’s something else I’ve seen in our children as they’ve grown and matured in their faith and their walk with Christ…they don’t understand Halloween either. 

We went into one of those little only-open-for-6-weeks Halloween shops to find a few props for their American Heritage Speech costumes and they were all a little freaked out by it. Especially the Ladybug. They love dressing up and playing pretend–but the angle that the growing majority of folks take with Halloween made their little spirits shiver–and I don’t blame them.

Much like Santa Claus, we have removed Halloween from our family traditions–and we don’t miss it. It didn’t have any meaning for us to begin with, it’s not really our idea of “fun.” And we don’t celebrate “Harvest” as a substitute. We celebrate harvest throughout September, October, and November because the goodness of the Lord and the overflowing of our “storehouses” is something we find worthy of celebration in and of itself–culminating in Thanksgiving. Harvest does have meaning to us and we celebrate it with joy and without any connection to Halloween at all.

We also don’t feel the need to “redeem” Halloween by being out there dressed up as clowns and passing out gospel tracts (ok, I am being a little facetious here) because we simply don’t see anything there to redeem. The “observance” has no religious or patriotic or historic meaning for us to try to “redeem.” Besides, our children are young and spiritually vulnerable. Even if they’re dressed up as princesses and cowboys, the rest of the night is filled with darkness and creepiness and full of bloody vampires, witches, zombies, and specters of death–exactly the kind of things I think we’re called on to shelter them from right now.

What we tell the munchkins…

Halloween is not the Devil’s birthday. The Bible doesn’t say anything about the Devil’s birthday so we shouldn’t speculate. But we do believe that evil is real and the Devil is real, because God tells us that in the Bible. We don’t think it’s fun or funny to pretend to be evil, or be something that is evil, or even something that is perceived to be evil. {Because something that doesn’t even exist, like vampires, can’t actually be evil.} It makes a mockery of something that God takes seriously and we are here to be a light in the darkness. We also think that Halloween has become an excuse for a lot of people to act badly, dress inappropriately, spend a lot of money and get a lot of junk–all things we try not to do as good stewards. We don’t participate in Halloween because sometimes a man’s witness is stronger for what he doesn’t do, than what he does.

We can’t protect our children from everything. They’ll face spiritual battles their whole lives. Big, serious, hard ones. Simply put, as a Christian family, Halloween was an easy one to walk away from.

What do you think about Halloween? Has your parenting journey changed your outlook?