The Curries

The Curries
Keith and Patricia

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Holidays or “hollow-days”

    Like it or not, it seems to me that the holiday season now includes Halloween.

    My Halloween journey has gone through quite an evolution through the years. When I was a kid, my parents dressed us up in homemade outfits and sent us into the neighborhood with brown paper grocery bags to say “Trick or treat” and come home with a haul of candy.

    When I entered college, I attended a Christian college and each class was assigned a party to host during the year. I think it was my sophomore year that our lot fell on the Halloween Party. We worked and planned and worked until we were almost ready. As I walked through the “haunted house” that we created, something in me became grieved. My friends and coworkers were Christian, and they seemed fine with the blood and gore and death and fear themes. Nevertheless, I was not at peace; no matter how I tried to ignore my inner warnings. Finally, I went to the class president and asked to be excused from participation. He agreed and I walked away, feeling a little guilty yet a lot relieved. That was the first conflict between my “life in the Spirit” and the dark influences that I saw shaping Halloween.

    The next revelation came for me when I was a young school teacher. Teaching in a public middle school setting during the Halloween season, I was amazed at the restlessness and disruptions during the week leading up to Halloween. A fight or two a day was the norm. When Halloween was over, things settled back down. To me that was noteworthy.
   
    As young parents, we lived in a neighborhood where houses were on three acre plots. “Trick or treating” was too inconvenient. Our young kids were not seriously caught up in the Halloween hoopla. They accepted our explanations fairly easily.

    On the other hand, I was the principal of a fledgling Christian school and we had to decide what to do about Halloween. We decided not to celebrate it, but we celebrated fall and harvest. We also published information for our school parents of Halloween’s beginnings and history. As time went on our church and school scheduled an alternative activity to give the children a sense of both community and of the celebration of harvest.

    In 2004 we moved into a neighborhood where Halloween was not so easy to avoid. Danny was eleven and the neighborhood kids left some candy on our steps with a “Boo” poster. An attached note explained that he was to pass it on to another child in the neighborhood. We ignored it. It happened again. We tried to ignore it, and ended up explaining to one of our neighbors that “we don’t do Halloween.” On Halloween night, we made sure that we weren’t home. We felt like we were running away.

    In the meantime, Halloween seems to have grown in popularity and seems to be “in our faces” everywhere we go. Our search for answers takes us to God’s word and to the foundational holidays, or feast days, introduced by Moses to the people of God.
Deut. 16: 1-3
Celebrate the Passover of the LORD your God,
Sacrifice as the Passover to the LORD your God an animal from your flock or herd . . .
so that all the days of your life you may remember the time of your departure from Egypt.

    In summary, this passage says three key things, “Celebrate, Honor the Lord, and Remember your history.”

    Can we do this with Halloween? Should we? Do we ignore it, knowing that our kids certainly can’t? Do we participate, exposing our young kids to some of the darker aspects of the celebration? Do we provide an alternative? Do we try to bring it “captive to the obedience of Christ”?
(to be continued)



















3 comments:

Lori said...

Thought you'd like to read this: http://justanotherclaypot.blogspot.com/2009/10/open-halloween-letter-from-ex-pagan.html

Donna said...

We don't "do" Halloween at our house and my kids have always felt like I've deprived them. I'm okay with that. Hopefully one day they'll understand.
As a teacher, I find that every year I want to "quit" teaching in October. Students seem to make foolish choices (as in "Have they lost their minds?!?!!?") The kids are becoming restless earlier and earlier (perhaps because of the gore and Halloween stuff that is out earlier each year.) I find that by the first week of November, things settle down considerably! It's not my imagination and I really believe it centers around the "dark" influences that are shoved in their faces the entire month of October!
anotherbattlewon.blogspot.com

Stacey Beavers Wielfaert said...

As a student who attended the Christian school where you were the principal, I remember wondering at the "big deal" about trick or treating. Mom and Dad received a Focus on the Family flyer about Halloween, and they explained it as a celebration of what is evil. We didn't trick or treat because one of my younger brothers was so scared after walking through the mall one Halloween, and it was all fine with me. It just wasn't up for discussion, and it made sense that if we were calling ourselves Christians and we were supposed to be loving "light", why would we need to be involved in a celebration of darkness? However, I believe that today the lines are blurred more than ever. It seems that Halloween has evolved from the "dress up for fun" with the emphasis on harvest and fall in your childhood to a "holiday" that truly focuses on things that are entirely scary and evil. When I refer to the "blurr", I mean that Christians of spirit-filled denominations, pentecostal denominations, baptist, methodist, everybody basically participates in some capacity. Even with the reintroduction of "harmless" witchery, wizardry, vampires, werewolves, parents are turning a deaf ear and a blind eye to what their Christian kids are being exposed. And, not only just being exposed to, but also perpetuating and participating in.
I believe it is a parallel to the many other things that I see my Christian students able to do without a guilty conscience like cheating on tests, skipping class, or lying to teachers.