Friday, October 30, 2009

How to Celebrate a Christian Halloween

Writing at First Things, an "interreligious" journal ("inter" as in Catholics and Protestants, maybe), Sally Thomas faces that annual hurdle of the Christian parent: What To Do About Halloween.

How can it be fun and still be doctrinally acceptable? She writes,

Halloween’s emphasis on darkness makes many Christians squeamish, but, to my mind, what my friend observed about the medieval feel of Halloween is more on the money.

I don’t especially encourage my children to dress as scary things for Halloween. We are taught, rightly, to avoid flirting with the occult, and the darkest character any child of mine has ever wanted to be is Darth Vader.


Don't you love that "flirting"? It's right up there with "dabbling," as in "dabbling with witchcraft."

Ducks dabble. Witches ... do other things. But, who knows, maybe "the occult" will kick things up a notch and kiss them back, slip them a little tongue. That Darth Vader costume might be the first step into experiential religion. You never know.

On All Saints’ Day, our parish holds a children’s festival, hugely attended, at which children and adults alike dress as their favorite saints. This year mine will be St. Ursula, St. Walburga, St. Gerard Majella, and St. George. I probably will reprise my last year’s appearance as St. Helena, although the True Cross did keep whacking people every time I turned around.

Watch out for the boy who wants to be St. Sebastian: he's probably gay.

Via Rod Dreher at BeliefNet, where the commenters actually display a wide variety of opinions about the celebration.

There is always the issue of sex with demons to consider as well.

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1 Comments:

Anonymous Robin said...

When I was a Christian (fundamentalist Baptist), we were not allowed to celebrate Halloween.

8:57 PM  

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