No Candy for You
October 31st, 2008And Stay Off my Grass
Today is Halloween. Hooray, hooray. My plans? Business as usual.
I used to think that Christians who refused to participate in Halloween traditions were going way overboard. Now I’m not so sure.
Halloween got its start as a pagan holiday. A Catholic Pope moved a Catholic holy day, All Hallows’ Eve, to October 31, and that’s where we get the term “Halloween,” but October 31 was already sacred to people who worshipped vile spirits. And it still is. They claim it as their most “sacred sabbath.” And they are especially active on that day, even now.
On Halloween, we encourage our kids to commit vandalism. We don’t tell them to do it, but we laugh about our own stupid childhood acts, as if we approve, and kids hear, and they imitate us. A single egg can damage a car to the tune of a thousand dollars. It can take weeks to get toilet paper off of your trees or house and out of your yard. I am personally familiar with the nasty job of cleaning up splattered jack-o-lanterns. Yet the vandalism tradition continues. In some places, they even refer to the night before Halloween as “Mischief Night,” and young idiots are expected to go out and commit arson.
As for dressing up, we tend to dress as evil supernatural beings, which is surely not a good idea. A big percentage of girls and women dress as sluts, and they often live up to the appearance.
Here in Miami, there is a publicly owned mansion called Vizcaya. They have a Halloween party there every year. Most people who go are between 21 and 30. Everyone gets good and drunk, and you will see a lot of exposed female flesh if you go. I’ve seen women wearing nothing but body paint from the waist up. After the party, people drive home drunk. Liquor companies put up tables and serve their products.
In Key West, they’ll put on a festival they call Fantasy Fest tonight. If you want to see nude, painted gay men walking down a major thoroughfare, this is where you need to be.
Every year, I have to make sure my car isn’t outdoors, because of the vandalism. That ought to tell you all you need to know about the wholesomeness of Halloween.
This year I’m not getting involved. No pumpkin. No candy. Trick-or-treating is nearly dead in Miami anyway, because people think their neighbors will poison the candy. Maybe the best thing is to help the tradition die. If it were just costumes, I would be thrilled to join in. But the pagan connection and the crime and the sex and the drunkenness and drug abuse put it over the top. People point to pagan influences on Christmas and Easter, but no objective person would draw a serious comparison. Let me know when someone eggs your house on Christmas. Whatever it used to be, it is now a Christian holiday. As for Easter, it has never been much of an event for me, and given what I know now, I would rather celebrate it on Passover and call it by its right name.
Some churches sponsor Christian Halloween activities. To me, that’s sort of like Christian heavy metal. You imitate something negative, and by doing that, you maintain your connection to it and keep the door open for more of the associated negativity to enter your life. People eventually become what they imitate.
Anyway, no candy tonight. And hopefully, no vandalism. I have done a lot of hard work in the yard, and I don’t want punks ruining it.
October 31st, 2008 at 10:37 AM
I don’t know about the Christian heavy metal thing. I know that Christian rock has made a lot of people in a somewhat new relationship with Jesus feel a lot more comfortable with being a Christian, not the other way around. And I have heard Christian kids comment that they find Christian rock to be “smarter” and that it makes them feel buttressed against kids who think that they aren’t cool.
Of course, the plural of anecdote is not data …
October 31st, 2008 at 12:23 PM
In Detroit they call it “Devil’s Night” and arson is one of the main features. As for me, I lost interest in Halloween when I moved from Miami. When I lived down there all my friends were goths and Halloween was “our” holiday, but even then it had been taken over by the exhibitionists. It was just another night of clubbing only with more crowds and extra dressing up. That’s no way for grown-ups to act.
October 31st, 2008 at 12:42 PM
You write: “A big percentage of girls and women dress as sluts, and they often live up to the appearance.”
I suggest instead: “A percentage of big girls and women dress as sluts, and they often make men throw up with their appearance.”
October 31st, 2008 at 1:19 PM
[…] The Hog reflects on Halloween. He’s hard to please. Every year, I have to make sure my car isn’t outdoors, because of the vandalism. That ought to tell you all you need to know about the wholesomeness of Halloween. […]
October 31st, 2008 at 1:56 PM
You should look back a couple of centuries to the behaviour of those celebrating Christmas – they’d give the current Hallowe’en celebrants a run for their money.
I’m not sure how you can so lightly dismiss Easter. The Resurrection is the central mystery of Christianity – the other holy days, both in the Christian and Jewish calendars, are of secondary import.
October 31st, 2008 at 2:09 PM
“I’m not sure how you can so lightly dismiss Easter.”
1. Named after a heathen goddess.
2. Celebrated at the wrong time.
Passover was fine for the Jews, including Jesus; why we needed to come up with Easter is beyond me.
October 31st, 2008 at 2:23 PM
1.) one of the best ways to sanitize a cultural artifact is to turn it into kid’s fare. Like fairy tales, no one takes Halloween seriously. Aside from the mischief, it’s good silly fun for the kids and doesn’t place their soul in harm’s way.
2.) Devil’s night is the night before Halloween in Detroit. A big yawner this year like most(yay!)
3.)Passover is not a celebration of Christ’s resurrection, when he conquerred both sin and death and redeemed you, paying the price of admission to Heaven and assuring your abundant life and certain hope of eternity. Oestra aside, it’s a pretty big deal. I can see observing it during the Passover (but which night?) but it is very important.
October 31st, 2008 at 2:33 PM
I celebrate Halloween every year, but not for the same reasons as other people. It just happens to be my birthday. Last year I celebrated by turning all my lights off and leaving a bucket of candy on the front porch, but those kids with the Unicef cans who kept ringing my doorbell over and over even though the candy bucket on the porch clearly states “I want to be left alone” ruined it. This year, I’m going out for burritos.
October 31st, 2008 at 3:42 PM
“Passover is not a celebration of Christ’s resurrection”
Sounds like you have a pre-1950s-Gentile take on Passover.
October 31st, 2008 at 4:56 PM
Monday (Moon day), Tuesday (Tyr’s day), Wednesday (Wodan’s day), Thursday (Thor’s day), Friday (Freya’s day), Saturday (Saturn’s day), Sunday (Sun day). The names of the days of the week have pagan antecedents.
The best evidence is that Christ was born much closer to the vernal equinox than the winter solstice. The timing of Christmas is suspect.
Your objections to Easter could be equally applied to the days of the week and most every other holy day in the Christian calendar.
October 31st, 2008 at 4:56 PM
aelfheld has the right of it.
Especially in northern climes, the winter solstice is a big deal. People were going to celebrate anyway. Hey, Marvin, the sun’s going back North again! It’s not gonna keep going South ’til it never comes up at all! Let’s party!” The early Church went with the flow, and over the centuries managed to turn it into a Christian holiday, never mind borrowing Wotan’s tree and the like. Same with Easter. Taking pagan holidays and re-purposing them as Christian ones is, to my mind, work that praises God.
The same process is occurring with Halloween, but it takes generations to do the modifications effectively. Prior to about 1910-20 or so, Americans didn’t do Halloween at all — the pranks and such, along with the treat-begging, came on Thanksgiving eve. That left All Hallows Eve for the pagans to frolic freely. This may not be optimum, but it’s at least better.
In Mexico the Church is much farther along, perhaps because it has more influence on society. October 31 is the Day of the Dead, when you go to the cemetery, decorate the graves of your ancestors, and remember them, much as Americans did before “Decoration Day” became “Memorial Day” with military overtones. It seems to me a custom worth imitating. American pumpkins-and-candy customs are seeping across the border, and a lot of the Mexicans I know aren’t best pleased that it’s happening.
You will of course do as the Spirit moves you, and you should, but you should also be careful not to be the kind of stonefaced party-pooper who induces people to reject the Word based on the kind of asshole(s) they see preaching it.
Regards,
Ric
October 31st, 2008 at 5:19 PM
“aelfheld has the right of it.”
Don’t see how you get that idea.
We still have seven days of the week. They haven’t been moved. Their weird pagan names haven’t obscured their original meanings to any significant degree. Even observant Jews say “Saturday”; and they don’t associate it with Saturn. They didn’t even give the days of the week Hebrew names, so it’s not like Judaism and Christianity lost a lot when the pagan names took over. The days of the week don’t have any relevance at all to what we’re talking about.
Easter was originally Passover, which has been around for thousands of years. Passover is the week of the Crucifixion, and Christians believe it celebrates the power of the Resurrection. The correct dates are determined on a Jewish lunar calendar, and they were set by God; the date of Easter is a colossal Christian screwup with no relevance to anything. Easter traditions are completely disconnected from Passover and its obvious relationship to the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Like a lot of American kids, I grew up thinking Easter was about a bunny that gave people chocolate.
It sounds like Mexicans are celebrating All Hallow’s Eve in a fairly predictable way. I don’t know how it relates to the issue.
This all seems obvious.
As for turning people off, it’s no Christian’s responsibility to be a carnival barker for God. Coating the church with candy has always been a mistake. It’s how paganism got into the church in the first place. Anyone who can only be content with the overwhelming blessings of Christianity as long as he gets to have a drunken debauch once a year is just too hard to please, and wasn’t getting the picture to begin with.
October 31st, 2008 at 5:25 PM
People who demand all or nothing generally get nothing, Steve.
Regards,
Ric
October 31st, 2008 at 6:06 PM
Questioning the wisdom of participating in Halloween isn’t “demanding all or nothing.” In modern culture there are a lot of pitfalls for moral people, and they’re not always obvious, and it’s wise to look for them and think them over.
You talk of repurposing pagan holidays, but that’s not what happened to Halloween. A Pope moved a Christian holiday to a pagan date, and the pagan part survived, and the Christian part dried up and disappeared, leaving only the name. What actually happened was the destruction of a Christian holiday. As for Passover/Easter, we have succeeded in completely destroying its Jewish history.
Halloween is a pretty disappointing holiday, and Easter is a weird corruption of a perfectly good holiday that still exists elsewhere on the calendar. I think it makes sense to point these things out and adapt.
October 31st, 2008 at 8:07 PM
Next year, it’s Key West for me!
November 2nd, 2008 at 12:02 AM
Well, being a pagan myself I am the aggrieved party here! LOL
The christian church not only stole our holidays but had the utter gaul to build your churches on our holy places.
SAMHAIN (Halloween to the christians) (October 31)
This is the begining of the Celtic New Year. It is the time of year when the veil between worlds is thinist and was considered a time for diviniation. It is a time of throwing out old ideas and settling problems. It is a time to remember the dead and to celebrate the continuation of life.
So you see the pagan holiday as you call it was nothing like the holiday you celebrate today.
I believe we pagans are getting a very bad rap here and it is unjustified!