Why We Love Halloween

Who wants to touch a third rail of American Orthodoxy with me?  The celebration of Halloween is a practice we did not abandon upon converting.  I like Halloween for several distinct reasons:

It is an inherently American cultural phenomenon.  It’s a nice way to meet your neighbors and actually spend an evening outdoors with your family.  We live in the Midwest, which means that 9 out of 10 Halloweens, we are walking through piles of crunchy leaves in brisk (if not cold) weather, then coming home to hot chocolate or cider.  The holiday is for the kids, not adults.  We do not attend parties where the object is to use the holiday as an excuse for debauchery.

There is so much great Halloween literature, crafts, even cartoons.  Leading up to the holiday, we watch The Great Pumpkin, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and the House of Mouse Villains Halloween Special.  My older children read short stories by Washington Irving and Edgar Allen Poe, poetry from Robert Frost and Henry Wordsworth Longfellow.  We sing songs about Five Little Pumpkins and Three Black Cats.  We carve pumpkins and build a huge spider web in our tree.

It says in Psalms that “This is the day the Lord has made.  Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”  Writing off any given day as a day of evil allows evil to win.  If your kid goes out and sacrifices a cat on October 31st, I’m going to wager there was something amiss before that particular day, and that it was not brought on by dressing as a princess/fairy/angel or a ninja/sword fighter/cowboy and going door to door to beg for candy.

 The celebration of Halloween contains many teachable moments.  Never miss an opportunity to give an age-appropriate lesson about how important the distinctions between us and our neighbors are.  Your children see the Halloween regalia in every store, from the tame to the abominable.  As Orthodox Christians, we have the access to the healthiest teaching on Death and the afterlife.  I always seize opportunities to revisit the lesson that Christ didn’t just overcome Death.   Christ used the very cross that Death believed had conquered Him to bust down the gates of Hades and TRAMPLED upon Death.  Talk about being hoisted on your own petard.  Skeletons?  How about a conversation starter on relics?  Explain why the idea of ghosts is inconsistent.  We do not believe that the souls of the departed wander lost.  What kind of all-powerful, loving Father would allow that?  We do, however, understand that Satan is the Great Deceiver, who masquerades as an angel of light, even as a child, if that is what is necessary to lead us away from God.  This also leads to conversations about proper ways of talking to the Departed (ie visiting witches to conjure Elijah a la King Saul: bad or intercessory prayers to your saint: good).  If your kids are teenagers, it’s an excellent time to talk about how real exorcisms can exist, and that the Darkness is nothing to be trifled with.

I love celebrations of All Saints and I think it is a lovely tribute to display an icon of the Feast along with candles.  If you do this, it is a lovely tribute, but I’ll also say that I think it is counter-productive to take a page out of the Protestant playbook by handing out Jack Chick-style tracts about Orthodoxy instead of candy, as I have heard some propose.  I assure you that it will meet with the same end as others before you- and eggs are particularly troublesome to scrub off of your house after a hard freeze.  Use the holiday to evangelize your own children and those close to you, not random folks from the neighborhood with whom you have no prior relationship.  You are going to freak them out, not minister to them.

All this being said, if your spiritual father or bishop has advised against the observation of Halloween, then, by all means, you should obey.  This is an issue where there is a variety of opinions, but there is no canon that speaks directly to it.  For more on this topic and a great Halloween resource page, check out John Sanidopoulos’ post at Mystagogy,   http://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2010/10/ten-things-i-wont-do-on-halloween.html