Halloween has always been my favorite holiday!
Christmas never felt quite as happy to me. It always felt complicated, like I was supposed to feel a certain way that I didn’t always feel. Maybe it’s the memories of having the stomach flu as a kid during the winter holidays, or feeling conflicted about wanting presents when we were supposed to be celebrating the birth of Jesus. Whatever it was, Christmas felt fraught.
Halloween, on the other hand, has always been pure joy.
Halloween has always felt like the most magical time of the year for me. Every October my neighborhood put on a haunted trail walk, where the path behind the houses would be transformed into a different world with tarps, fog machines, strobe lights, and plastic monster figures. It felt like stepping into a fantasy story with mythical creatures and we were the adventurers who had to make it out in one piece. The kids would be mildly scared, the adults would be mildly drunk, and everyone had fun. Then, of course, there was picking out a costume, and doing two laps around the neighborhood on Halloween night to maximize the candy haul.
Being the anxious and easily frightened child I was, I’m not sure why I was so drawn to the dark and macabre of Halloween. Logically, my neighbor’s zombie and skeleton animatronic figures and ghost-witch lady that screamed when you walked by (he took Halloween very seriously) should have terrified me, but I adored it. Even as an adult I love seeing people’s creative yard decorations and watching my neighborhood get into the spooky spirit.
Maybe it’s a bit of escapism for me that I can put aside all the true horrors of the world, many of which I see up close every day in the hospital, and can immerse myself in a world of fictional horror that is all made up in the end. The monsters are just plastic, the murderers are just people in costumes, the dead aren’t really dead. We get to make fun of and be playful about the things that scare us, and it can take away a bit of their power.
More than just fun, though, Halloween has always felt spiritual to me. As a kid it was one of my first connections to spirituality. In a sense, Halloween is a way to explore life after death. On Halloween the skeletons talk, the dead walk, and the ghosts are your friends. The dead aren’t gone but go on existing in their own mystical world, getting into mischief and scaring the living for fun. In a culture that fears and rejects death, this is one time we can talk and think about it in a lighthearted way.
I learned in church during high school that this opinion isn’t shared by many Christians, as I was told that we celebrate “harvest festival” and that Halloween is of the devil. But I knew in my heart I wasn’t worshiping Satan when I wore a witch costume to trick-or-treat. I was using my imagination and creating a world in my mind that was fun and exciting. As a kid who was shy and existed on the margins of the social hierarchy, I loved the opportunity to embrace creativity and make space for all things dark and strange.
Most of all I still love Halloween because it doesn’t demand anything of me. I don’t have to feel merry, I don’t have to buy everyone I love the perfect gift, I don’t have to have a “reason for the season”, I just get to enjoy it. My yard is decked out with ghosts, jack-o-lanterns, skeletons, and tombstones, and I can’t wait to take my two year old niece trick-or-treating this week.
Happy Halloween to all who celebrate!
Header photo by Beth Teutschmann on Unsplash
Skeleton photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash
Trick or Treaters photo by Yaroslav Shuraev:
I have always loved Halloween — and, frankly, scoffed at the many Christians who get uptight about it. It’s a time when little kids get to dress up and pretend to be something or someone, they can go door to door and be welcomed, and we get to give them candies … just for fun. Delightful, in so many ways!
I just was telling my wife last night, after returning home from a church “harvest festival” full of monsters and witches and ghosts, that for some reason I have always liked Halloween. I’m sure the free chocolate had a lot to do with that, but as a kid I always liked to draw the picture of a haunted house, accompanied by witches on brooms, ghosts, owls, black cats, skeletons, tombstones, spider webs and more. My liking Halloween surprises me because I am very opposed to the occult and its accompanying demonic activities. But Halloween—at least the way I have celebrated it—almost seemed more like a mockery of the devil, as if no one was taking the occult seriously, but playfully instead. I don’t know. When some questioned our church’s “Trunk or Treat” night because Halloween was the devil’s day, I always told them that last I knew the devil didn’t hold the deed to any day of the year.
I’m laughing as I read this blog and especially the two comments ahead of mine. What a contrast! Being raised in an ultra-conservative congregation of the CRC back in the 1960s, Halloween meant nothing like the preceding writing. We attended Reformation Day services where we heard pastors condemn the wandering “candy-beggars” in our small town, instead lifting up the story of Martin Luther and the 95 thesis on the Wittenberg Door. We were the” righteous elect”, the chosen few saved from the evil wanderers outside the doors of our church. It reminds me again how what once was so condemned is now shrugged off or accepted.
Same here. I remember a year when my sister and I ordered materials from UNICEF just so we could wear costumes and join the fun. We promised not to accept any candy, but the answer was still no.
Next thing we know, we’ll be sitting down to eat with publicans and sinners.
Our family owned a pumpkin patch, so Halloween was always a highlight of my year. This was never an issue in our local CRC community when I was a kid. Everyone at our Christian school went out trick-or-treating, even to the teachers’ houses. My mom got into the act and made us some wonderful costumes, some of which my own kids wore.
It was about the time my own sons were entering school in the mid-’90s that the backlash started. Our school started a “Reformation Celebration” the same night as trick-or-treating, urging kids to come dressed as biblical characters or martyrs (yes, really). One kid came dressed in a long white robe with his hands tied around a stake behind his back with a faux fire burning around him. My second grade son’s teacher told the class that if they participated in trick-or-treating, God would be very unhappy with them. My son sat in the car and cried all night as his brothers went out in search of candy (yes, words were exchanged with this teacher).
My friends and relatives who are anti-Halloween are not impressed with my insistence that both Christmas trees and Easter eggs have pagan backgrounds, as does the date set for Christmas itself.