A web-friend was recently asked about Halloween and what he thinks about it as a Christian.  His response, as expected, was thorough, honest, and appropriate.  Mine, is well…perhaps a little less so.

I don’t really dig on Halloween & Church.  Not because I think it is demonic or sinful or whatever.  And it is not because I prefer All Saints’ Day (which we’ll get to).  It is because I am becoming much less interested in secular holidays mixing with the church.  The part where the two get mixed up and intertwined.  I’m much more interested in Mardi Gras kicking off Lent than Halloween kicking off All Saints’ Day.

The one exception, of course, is if there is a big community spirit within the place and we are all Trick-or-Treat kind of people.  If we all love to dress up and go to each others’ houses and do Halloween parties and it is all part of our identity.  Then I’m really cool with it and say “run with it, people!”  Otherwise, meh!

Perhaps the real reason I don’t like mixing the two is because All Saints’ Day isn’t a big enough day for me to warrant Halloween.  And I’m becoming increasingly disinterested in church holidays that aren’t directly related to the gospel.  Again, I’m not trying to be a stick in the mud, it’s just that I don’t get up for these feast days.  Trinity Sunday?  Christ the King?  All Saints’ Day?  No thanks.

I have two other reasons I don’t like All Saints’ Day at the moment.  One is that I’m not digging on venerating the saints (how Protestant of me!).  I’m more “remember and learn from them individually” than remember the whole host of them.  The second is that it seems as if the day has turned into “Dead Family Member Remembrance Day, and that doesn’t seem to be the point.  Don’t get me wrong, we can certainly schedule Dead Family Member Remembrance Day into our calendar and process crosses and all of that.  But this seems to overshadow the Feast itself.

Before you get the wrong idea and think I’m trying to take away people’s fun, I want to say that I actually really like Halloween.  I like seeing people’s costumes and taking my kids out to wander semi-aimlessly in pursuit of candy.  It is an enjoyable day.  We also saw several of the houses had pretty good Halloween parties going on inside and it made me want to join them.  Or, more accurately, live in their house and throw my own party.  And as for All Saints’ and your honoring of a parent that has left this mortal coil, I would never take that away from you.  We should do that with honor and grace and in such a way in which the focus is on your loved one and all the other loved ones we want to remember–not mixed up with faceless people named Francis or Augustine.

These days have sort of morphed beyond themselves and what we really like about them.  The fantasy and pageantry are overshadowed by a greed for candy and the inevitable sugar-induced coma.  These are days in which the simple purity of the time, so sweetly decadent is overshadowed by our ham-handed approach and the gluttony of overindulgence.  Perhaps both of these holidays could be saved if we toned them down, just a smidge: not in our hearts, mind you, but in our actions.  For Halloween, we should enjoy the spectacle and worry less about the candy (fat chance, I know), let alone our desire to eat half of the bag immediately.  And for All Saints’ we should tone down our pageantry and make more subtle reminders of our families, so that they don’t overtake what is intended to be a joyous celebration.

Then again, what is Halloween about, but revealing our id’s to the world.

“I got ID” by Pearl Jam