I have said this before but I really think the attitude that Christians shouldn't celebrate Halloween is generational and really a new thing. A lot of Christians my age don't have a big problem with it. I am in my forty's and I remember being a kid in the Late 60's and 70's and everyone celebrated Halloween. It was celebrated in school and even at churches. All churches --Fundamentalist Baptist included. My best friend went to a very large Fundamentalist Baptist church and they celebrated Halloween. It was a benign fun holiday where in the 60's people made homemade treats and shared it with their neighbors. Halloween parties for adults and children were very common. No one had a problem with it. The Fundamentalist Church my husband went to as a teenager, use to have a very well known haunted hay ride. You had to listen to the gospel message before the hay ride but it was still a Halloween haunted hay ride with all the scary trimmings.
Then in the late 70's you had the Halloween candy scares. So then, no more homemade treats only wrapped candy. It really wasn't till the mid to late 80's that there began to be a backlash of Halloween in the Church Communities. Even in the 90's when we were attending a Southern Baptist church and my daughter was going to a Southern Baptist school, they still dressed up, but the kids couldn't be in scary costumes. During that time when we were young adults and young parents, we wrestled with do we celebrate Halloween or not. We had Christian friends that ran the gambit from pretending to not be home, to telling neighbors not to visit their house, to passing out tracks with the candy. Well frankly all that to us is silly now and doesn't make for good neighborly relations.
My husband and I both had great fond childhood memories of Halloween. It was very much a family neighborly time. It only has the meaning you give it. Frankly it is fun. Scary is fun, and it is a way to poke fun at things that may scare you. Just because some people use the day for evil does not make it evil for everyone. There are evil people doing evil things every day of the year.
We have no issue anymore with Halloween. We are in a very dense family friendly neighborhood. We get close to 100 trick or treaters each year (I know because I make up the treat bags). We get so many because our neighborhood is very family dense but also because there is a house at the end of our street that plays scary movies on their garage door and passes out full size candy bars and sodas. Our house is on the way to his house. We have become the house known for our cool pumpkin carving. It has become a family tradition and my daughter was over last night to carve pumpkins. I'll try to post some pictures on my blog tonight of the pumpkins. She was even teaching her friends at college how to carve pumpkins. Ok I apologize for such a long rant. Just my 2 cents. Sorry for being so long winded.
1 comment:
what a nice job!
Post a Comment