I try to avoid talking about Halloween. In this day and age it seems to be one of those topics (like whether or not you tell your kids Santa is real) that defines you as THAT mom. It puts me on one side of a fence and maybe you’re standing there on the other. I don’t like that. So first and foremost let me be totally clear— you have to be true to your conscience. Whatever it is God is asking your family to do, DO IT. On this issue I stand with anybody who is obeying God’s calling even if it means we disagree on how that practically works out. So with that in mind, here’s my personal history with Halloween and how we participate in it as a family today:
As a kid I loved Halloween. It was a time for playing dress up (yay!), eating candy (yay!), carving pumpkins (yay!), and putting up some spooky decorations (yay!). My mom had one rule— we didn’t dress up as anything “evil”. No devils, no ghosts, no witches. As the mom now I would add clowns to that list, but that’s just me. We had a very safe home and neighborhood and my parents didn’t let us watch scary movies, tv shows, or read scary books. We weren’t fearful kids and we enjoyed Halloween for the fun time that it was.
Fast forward to our group home years. Brian and I worked with kids who had experienced some scary things. Real life scary things. Sometimes they could talk with us about those things, but sometimes they were too deep and personal for them to ever feel safe revealing. The rules about living in community with those kids required us to never intentionally scare them (not even yelling “boo” when somebody came around the corner), no scary movies or books and we didn’t participate at all in Halloween. This makes total sense to me and I don’t at all find it to be a contradiction to how I was raised. These kids had a different life experience that told them the world wasn’t safe and we were doing our best to help them learn to trust again. It would not have been worth it to engage in a day (or a month as it seems Wal-Mart has decided) of scaring the living daylights out of them for the damage it would have done to our relationship. The people we worked under had strict religious reasons for why Halloween was spiritually damaging and theologically questionable. I agreed in the context of the kids we were dealing with, but have felt free to make the decision that works best for my own family now that we are in a different enviornment.
So what have we decided to do?
We trick-or-treat. We don’t do much in the way of decorating, but that’s more because I’m cheap and not very crafty than it is about my theological thoughts on Halloween. My kids won’t dress up as anything questionable and we don’t engage in any glorification of gore or violence.
I’m not going to attempt a theological justification for why I think this is okay (if we wanted to, maybe we could go down this “what you intended for evil, God has used for good” road or talk about how most “Christian” holidays started out as pagan celebrations that we co-opted for our own purposes), but I want to talk about the practical realities of being involved in Halloween as a Christian. How do we represent Jesus on October 31st?
-We get to know our neighbors. We in the midwest live in a climate of extreme temperatures. Sometimes it’s tough to get to know your neighbors when it’s either below freezing or hotter than the surface of the sun. Halloween is one time when we take our kids to meet all the friendly faces on our street and create connections.
-We get to give a gift to the neighbor kids. You can engender a lot of good favor with the little people on your street with the right chocolate bar or tootsie pop. And Jesus has a lot of good things to say about blessing little children.
-We get to talk to our kids about death. In our home we don’t avoid the topic of death. Having lost two babies, heaven is frequently part of our conversation. The imagery of death that exists at Halloween opens the door for us to explain why we have a reason not to be afraid. “Where, O Death, is your victory? Where, O Death, is your sting?”
-We can help our kids confront fears. We’ve got one truly terrifying house we trick-or-treat at every year. The adults there are creative, sweet people who really love putting on a show. It’s nothing gory, just creepy. The kids each year delight in being brave enough to go up to the door. This gives us the opportunity to talk about why things are frightening and how God asks us to be courageous.
-We talk about our heroes. Last year all three kids went as Spiderman (the neighbors kept saying to my daughter, “How cute! Spidergirl!” and she’d yell, “I SpiderMANgirl.”). As we were walking from house to house I loved watching Josh pretend to fight “bad guys”—anybody in a scary costume— to protect his younger siblings. On the way home I talked to him about how Spiderman is a hero who saves people’s bodies, but Jesus is a hero that saves souls. His fascination with heroes and his experience navigating a night of ghosts and goblins had him all primed for a conversation about right and wrong, good and bad, heroes and villains that we wouldn’t normally have had.
-We learn to be polite and to share. It’s such great practice of our “please” and “thank you” skills to go house after house getting candy from neighbors. I’m always proud of how my kids handle themselves and how they represent our family. And last year as I was having my annual internal post trick-or-treating dialogue about if I should post photos or if for the sake of my friends who disagree with me I should just keep this quiet, I watched Josh handing out his cache of candy to his cousins. He kept giving and giving and Mama was watching her share of Nerds and Snickers get passed to her nephews and finally I said, “Hey Josh, you don’t need to give any more of your candy away. They have their own candy.” He came over to me and whispered in my ear, “It makes Jesus happy when I share.” I couldn’t argue with that.
So even if you choose to spend Halloween hunkered in the dark of your basement, if this year Mace Windu, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Chewbacca accidentally ring your doorbell, maybe you can answer it and give them an extra box of Nerds. That’s Mama’s favorite.