My Christian Facebook feed appears to have taken a temporary break from telling me how Catholics aren’t real Christians and is instead focusing on the evils of Halloween.
It glamorises witchcraft, the occult, its pagan origins, some might say. Its tied to spirits, and the thinning veil between the living and the dead.
Others say that it glorifies evil, death, and fear. Costumes of witches, demons, ghosts, zombies, haunted houses etc celebrating or trivialising what Scripture calls detestable or dark. A high day for Satanists.
That may be true, but its not what I dislike about Halloween. Its the knock on the door in the early to late evening to be greeted by teenage scroats wearing bin bags demanding fun size mars bars in exchange for not kicking the bins over or trampling the shrubberies. Hmmm, maybe thats not a very Christian sentiment to be holding now that I am fully signed up to the principle of imago dei. It is what it is.
My youngest called it Orange Christmas one year when he was very little and had made the connection with all the tat that fills the supermarket aisles at Christmas, and again in October, but this time, instead of reds and greens and gold and silver, the colour is mostly orange for pumpkins, though there is a lot of black and purple involved too. I must confess that I do quite the colour palette of Halloween.
I write Ghost Stories, so I have a natural inclination to the themes of Halloween. I grew up in a rural area. Harvest Festival was celebrated, the changing of the seasons did not go unnoticed as the nights drew longer and everything seemed to die. That veil that thins this time of year, sometimes you can see it in the heavy fog that hangs over our towns, villages, fields, woods, and the cemeteries we used to play. Its an atmospheric time, mysterious and beautiful.
But then there’s all the tat. And getting the kids in a costume, make up, going door to door to say trick or treat, and return with a bucket of sugary stodge that I don’t like them eating. Who can be arsed with that? Not me.
There’s no need for it.
