Your thoughts on Halloween.... (a diatribe by ChoralScholar)

The other night it occurred to me that some 20-25 years ago, we used to go trick-or-treating and nobody thought anything about it. However, somewhere in the meantime, Halloween got demonized as being satanic by most of the churches in this part of the country, and we have been continually warned how dangerous it is to trick-or treat.

This is something the churches evidently just made up. I just remember that all of a sudden, all the churches were talking about how evil Halloween was, and how it was worshipping satan. You know what, though? I'm pretty sure that there are satanic people that use Halloween as some sort of ritualistic holiday, but, kids know nothing about that. All kids are doing is dressing up as something and going out to get candy. End of story. Something is only "satanic" if it is used to worship satan.
If you're hoarding Kit-Kats and Reese's, then you're hoarding Kit-Kats and Reese's. If you are making sacrifices to Beelzebub, then you're making sacrifices to Beelzebub. The two are not one and the same, nor are they even remotely associated.
If you want to talk about an evil or pagan holiday, let's have a discussion about Easter. But churches seem to have no problem with bunnies and eggs. It obviously has a lot to do with the resurrection of Christ, as any educated person can see.

If this all sounds foreign to you, remember that I grew up in Atkins, Arkansas, were there are 2800 people and 27 churches.

Besides the obvious duplicity of the Christian church calling Halloween satanic, here's my main problem: in my entire life I remember not one story about some kid getting hurt or kidnapped or whatever on Halloween. But, all of a sudden we were looking for syringes in candy, pretending that our neighbors were waiting all year just to hand out poisoned candy to all the kids, and all sorts of asinine things like that. Did anything actually ever happen to bring this on, or did people make that stuff up too? When and why did people turn Halloween into such an evil and dangerous thing?

Just wondering. I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

I usually get upwards of 300* kids every Halloween. In fact, I am taking a half vacation day from work tomorrow to be home for them. We get kids of every size, shape, color and religion. It is truly a rainbow experience, and I love it.

* My next-door neighbors are anal enough to count the kids. I keep asking them for the total.

I'm going to do my doctoral work in Chicago. Glad to see its that kind of community.

So-called "lakefront liberal" area. People from all over bring their kids here. Minivans stop on the street and drop off hordes of kids. It is great fun.

effectively being a time when this world and the next could be open to one another and those that have moved on could come back and visit us. Some of the pagans and wiccans on this board could tell you more than me. I just know the sketchy outlines.

Xtianity has co-opted Halloween in an effort to win over the northern European pagans to the early church (same with what we now call xmas).

The demonization of halloween by the fundamentalist xtains has unfortunately coincided with the few every year who insist on ruining it for everyone with the razor blades on apples, and the tainted candie. Regardless of how few incidents there are of such nonsense.

Fundamentalist xtains are looking for a pure form of monotheism (as Judaism and Islam are), but it's an exercise in futility, because xtainty never was that to begin with.

We could wax academic for quite some time about the origins of Halloween. My contention is that the gathering of bite-size candybars in Superman costumes has no relation to the actual holiday. But it has been treated as such.

I didn't make that very clear in my last post. It's late and I'm enjoying my wine! LOL!

My topic sentence is that is its this misunderstanding of what *exactly* Halloween is, the layers of tradition, that causes otherwise well-meaning fundie adults to ruin it for their kids. There are none so ignorant of their own history than fundamentalist xtians.

But the kids here still dress up and go door to door. I don't get many b/c I live in the country. I always had to go into town to visit my uncle and aunt's neighborhood.