Halloween

As a Christian, I sometimes struggle with how to celebrate (or not celebrate) Halloween. On the one hand, I have a great number of very good memories of Halloweens past. My mom loved Halloween and she always took great pains to make it a very fun opportunity for friends and family to gather and enjoy each other. Halloween was a big costume party that was a shared community event. I also recognize that Halloween was the eve of All Saint’s Day, a Christian celebration in honor of all the saints, known and unknown.

On the other hand, Halloween’s roots is actually Celtic, the festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). Halloween

marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31, they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. In addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future.

Halloween was a very spiritual time of the year.

Does it bother me that any holiday celebration has pagan roots? Not really. I am not necessarily concerned that Halloween has pagan origins. My only concern is that Halloween may glamorize or trivialize death and evil. In fact, the older traditions did nothing of the kind. Rather, our modern skeptical worldview has created a Halloween where death and evil are celebrated.

We no longer think evil actually exists. Evil is seen as a state of mind rather than a real and hungry power. It is an aberration, a bump along the path of progress, a temporary hindrance to our human potential.

Evil is real; it lies in wait for us (Gen. 4:7, I Peter 5:8). And it should not be so quickly dismissed.

That said, our response to evil and death is very important. Do we cower in fear or do we acknowledge its reality with confidence and courage? Maybe Halloween is a time to thumb our noses at Satan. Tell him that I think all of his powers and strategies are "cute" and harmless like the little ghoulies in bedsheets. In a very real way, dressing up and decorating the house in a "scary" way mocks Death and Satan and, as a Christian, proclaims that they have no power of me or my life.