It’s Halloween!–one of my least favorite holidays of the year. I know that offends many people, but so be it. Still, the onset of Halloween brings back memories–many of them religion and church related. Maybe that’s why I don’t like the holiday!
As a 61-year-old guy with no small children in my life, I don’t do Halloween. Often Jeanne and I celebrate the day by going to a late afternoon movie, followed by dinner, so we can be conveniently away during whatever time the parental units deem it safe for the children to be trick-or-treating. I know that I sound like a Halloween Grinch, and there’s a certain amount of truth to that. I think Halloween is a generally useless and stupid holiday, although I participated in it fully in my youth and faithfully put in my time as a co-organizer of trick-or-treating in my house when my sons were young. I’ve been seeing Halloween stuff in stores since August and will be glad when today is over so miles of shelves can be cleared for the display of Christmas stuff two months before the day. Not. But thinking about Halloween puts me in a reminiscent mood about both persons and times long gone.
In rural Vermont, there was no walking from house to house for trick-or-treating. Our closest neighbors were at least a half mile away; accordingly, my mother logged 20-30 miles of driving every October 31 as my brother and I filled a grocery bag each with an amazing haul. This was long before the scares of razor blades and poison in Halloween treats—we collected unwrapped caramel apples and popcorn balls, maple sugar candy before it went on the market, freshly baked pastries, and more. People who gave only a candy bar or a little bag of candy corn were losers. Our haul filled several large bowls at home; despite my mother’s generally futile attempts at rationing, the Halloween proceeds usually lasted until close to Christmas.
Two unrelated issues caused the Halloweens of my youth to be fraught with cognitive dissonance. First, Halloween was my mother’s birthday. My mother was an “everyone else first” person by nature, and my brother and I took full advantage of her deference to all as the day was all about us rather than her. I’m having a difficult time scrounging up any memories of celebrating her natal day, a cake, a present, anything—my brother and I were selfish little bastards, apparently. Second, I had a sneaking suspicion that observing Halloween each year was putting me on the fast track to hell. We regularly heard at Calvary Baptist Church, where we spent most of every Sunday and Wednesday evening, that Halloween was the devil’s holiday, that participating in an evil holiday that celebrated pagans and demons and witches was a slap in Jesus’ face, and so on. But I was never worried, because my mother—a very devout conservative Baptist—was even more dedicated to common sense and her sons having as much of a normal childhood preacher’s kids could have. So we did Halloween, but we did not trick-or-treat at the houses of anyone who went to our church.
It may be due to his usually being on the road during the fall, but I have only one Halloween memory related to my father—it was the year that the communists tried to take the holiday over. In the middle of October during one of my early years in school—probably second or third grade—the teacher announced a new plan for trick-or-treating. Instead of gathering the usual tonnage of candy, this year we were asked to “Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF,” hitting people up for money instead of sweets, money that would be sent to help children in need around the world. In art class we made boxes out of pint milk containers to hold the money; there would be a blow-out party (with candy, presumably) at school in the evening where we would turn in the proceeds. I dutifully made the container and innocently reported the new twist on Halloween to my parents at home.
Dad went ballistic. I was too young to know much about politics, but I discovered during my father’s rant that among other things, “Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF” was a sign of creeping socialism as well as the UN’s ungodly push toward one world government, and a sure prophetic glimmer of the beast from the Book of Revelation. For all we knew, they might be imprinting a “666” on us when we brought in our money on Halloween evening. Trick-or-treating for UNICEF was apparently more ungodly than taking “Christ” out of “Christmas.” Needless to say, that year we trick-or-treated for ourselves as was our custom and did not go to the party.
If I needed such evidence, I became fully aware of just how much the world had changed the first time I encountered Halloween in a city. Halloween 1988 found Jeanne and me with my nine and six-year-old sons in Milwaukee where I had just started my PhD studies at Marquette University, living on the upper floor of a duplex in a reasonably safe urban neighborhood. As the Monday holiday approached (my memory is not that good—I just looked it up on Google), newspapers and television newscasters announced that for purposes of safety and community solidarity, trick-or-treating would occur on the previous Sunday afternoon, October 30, from 3:00-5:00 PM.
I completely understood the reasoning, given yearly reports of after-dark Halloween mishaps and tragedies across the country, but as Jeanne and I walked a few blocks of our neighborhood with Caleb and Justin in broad daylight along with a hundred or so other families, on a Sunday afternoon that wasn’t even Halloween, I thought “this is really f–ked up.” What would my childhood Calvary Baptist Church pastor have said about my language and about participating in pagan activities on the Lord’s Day afternoon? Probably not too much, since he regularly spent his fall Sunday afternoons worshiping at the altar of NFL football on television. To each their own pagan activity!
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