On Loving Halloween

I got an email asking whether Christians should celebrate Halloween. What the what? Is this a thing now? There is even a question? You know what the answer is?

“Come on, folks, lighten up!”

I recall getting into it a few years ago with a middle-aged Catholic woman, who was upset with me because I embraced Halloween with enthusiasm and dressed my kids up as scary invisible monks.

That particular year, as I recall, I had a purple witch hanging from the front porch, looking as though she would swoop down upon my trick-or-treaters (they were after her candy, after all!) and a series of headstones with sayings like “I told you I was sick!” leading up to the path. The headstones were outfitted with purple and black tulle bows, and sandbag luminaria lighted the path, at the end of which was an “freshly dug grave” with one bloody hand reaching out.

My husband wasn’t happy that I’d dug up part of the garden.

The porch was also festooned with the black and purple tulle, as bunting, with white Christmas lights inside. The kids who came to our door were giddy and thrilled with it, and they were also happy with the live witch in the rocking chair, the one with the hat, the green skin and cackle who handed out their treats, and told them to “be veeeerrrrrry careful out there, my little chickens and dumplings…”

But she only appeared on the porch that year and never again, because she liked candy too much, and ohhh…it was ugly, the next day.

Earlier on that particular Halloween, I had appeared at my son’s Catholic school and, attired as that same witch, read aloud from the wonderful book, The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything, which is a fun interactive story.

Halloween is a big happy day in this house, and that is precisely what this lady at church did not like. She told me I was being used as a tool for the devil “to make evil ordinary.”

I told her that evil is made ordinary every single day simply in how we treat each other, and that my gleeful Halloween antics had less to do with making “evil ordinary” than in proving that externals are mostly powerless over us, except as our own minds and souls perceive them. I said, “mock the devil he will flee from thee…”

She remained unconvinced and remains one of the few folks I’ve ever encountered who took Halloween seriously as an evil day, and she was not persuaded by my asking her if she, as a child, was tempted into evil, or more amenable to evil, because of the ghosts and mummies of Halloween.

I can only speak for myself and my family. We get an enormous kick out of Halloween. We loved coming up with inventive costumes for the kids and ourselves (and the dog, who every year wears a home-made red spangled devil costume; she’s a “Devil Dog!”) and making them to last; my son Buster has many of his early costumes, still, in his closet — he won’t part with them; not with Big Bird, not with the Medieval King, not with the Tin Man, not with the Executioner. We love seeing the little ones all dressed up as pirates and rag dolls and such. We love watching the bigger kids, who are almost embarrassed to be trick-or-treating, but still want their candy and say, “awesome!” when we throw handfuls of the stuff at them (we always buy too much and of course we don’t want it in the house afterwards, because…some of us like candy a lot…)

If you are inclined to harangue me about this, please don’t waste your time. Don’t email me that I’m going to hell, and don’t throw scripture at me. I will remain unconviced, because I have experienced real evil in my life and it came in the form of an ordinary human being who looked and lived and worked just like everybody else, not via some pale-faced creature with fake blood dribbling from the corner of his mouth.