Halloween's Not Evil

So, today's the first of November and I said I was going to attempt to post every day this month. This is going to be interesting!

Yesterday was Halloween. I didn't feel up to going all-out this year, so I didn't decorate and I didn't really dress up (I popped on one of my wigs and that was that). I did hand out treats to the few kids that showed (plea to world: please come our house, Trick-or-Treaters!), but it was overall pretty low-key around here.

Here's the thing: there are people out there who don't celebrate Halloween because "it's not a Christian holiday" or "it's based on a pagan holiday" or the most insane of all "it's Satan's birthday." Let me just say right now that that is patently STUPID (if you believe the last one, you are truly an idiot). If you know anything about the history and development of Christianity, then you know that pretty much the entire religion is based on "pagan" traditions. If this is something you don't know and you consider yourself a Christian, please, please, please for the love that is all good in this world, go read a book about the history of Christianity! Karen Armstrong's A History of God is a good place to start. After that read Bart D. Ehrman's Lost Christianities, Lost  Scriptures, and How Jesus Became God. Not knowing the history of the faith in which you purport to believe is pretty pathetic.

It's actually pretty scary to me that so many modern-day evangelicals are being led to believe that the particular version of Christianity being practiced at their individual church is 1) the only valid version and 2) is "traditional" Christianity (it is neither).

Halloween in its current incarnation is fairly removed from it's Christian roots and even further removed from ancient "pagan" traditions. Obviously, it's NOT "Satan's birthday." That particular bit of ridiculousness was dreamed up in the 1950s by some nutcase. Halloween's been around quite a bit longer than that. Today's Halloween is a chance to have fun by dressing up, either as a favorite character or as something "scary," and an excuse to indulge in candy-eating and scary movie-watching (if you're into that sort of thing, personally I am not a fan of scary movies, candy, however, is delicious). There's no deeper meaning behind any of those traditions (yes, they have historical roots in medieval traditions and superstitions which have even older historical roots, so what? as they exist today, they are simply FUN). It really is just as superficial as it seems: something that we do that's actually pretty silly, but is a lot of fun and is engaged in solely because it's fun. Actually, that's a damn good reason to do just about anything.

If you're against Halloween, you're against something incredibly innocent. And if you're against Halloween, but you celebrate Christmas complete with a tree, Santa, a feast of some sort, then you are either a hypocrite or  incredibly ignorant. However, if you don't celebrate any holidays that aren't explicitly in the Bible because you have been led to believe that that is the "correct" way to be Christian, then, you are probably a pretty damn boring person to be around and you've been seriously misled by someone who doesn't have a good understanding of  nor a solid foundational knowledge of Christianity. I could go on more about that, but I'm not going to, at least not now.

Halloween's not evil. It never has been. It's a night of harmless fun. Well, okay, maybe candy is a little evil. Delicious, delicious evil.