Halloween was always a great part of my childhood. After all, what child doesn’t like to dress-up in costume and eat lots of candy? One year, my brothers and I put together a haunted house in our basement all by ourselves and then opened it up to the kids in the neighborhood. I was the bloody dead girl in the coffin who sat up and screamed at them when they walked past. And as a parent, I initiated my own child into this annual frenzy of make-believe with ghost stories and visits to the local haunted house and let’s not forget the pillowcase full of candy that was gone in a week.
My second husband really had the Halloween spirit and each year the graveyard on our front lawn grew bigger and spookier and there were new surprises for the kids every year. I remember one year, a little boy refused to step on our property. His dad told him it would be fine and just to prove it, he came to the door for his son’s candy while the boy waited at the mailbox. That year, my husband had rigged a giant mutant bat creature to fly over the heads of the trick-or-treaters as they came up the walk and just as this dad was trying to prove his point to the boy, the creature glided over the dad’s head and the man screamed. And then of course he laughed.
Some might ask, “Where was your Christianity in all of this?” and I must admit that for the last few Halloweens before my husband left me, I was a Christian. But this was all in fun. There’s no harm in just pretending, is there? Sure, Halloween may have been based on pagan rituals and occult celebrations in the past, but that was long ago. In today’s society, isn’t it just a commercial holiday that has no spiritual or religious significance? At least that’s what I told my Christian friend who was opposed to participating in Halloween festivities or allowing her children to trick-or-treat.
After my husband left me, Halloween wasn’t as fun anymore and since I didn’t have trick-or-treaters coming to my apartment, I stopped engaging in Halloween but saw no reason not to at least check out the local Halloween shops to see the new decorations and displays. It was on one such trip to a Halloween shop that I began to question my original assumptions. While I was enjoying a creative graveyard display with a no-faced, black-robed creature with bony hands raised, hovering in front of the cardboard cemetery, I was suddenly overcome with a distinct sense of pure evil. Not even Steven King with all his experience could describe the touch of pure evil I encountered that day, so I won’t even try. Unnerved and terrified, I ran from the store. As I sat in my car, I couldn’t get rid of the feeling of being coated in a slimy darkness, as if I had run through a pool of tar or molasses and it had now hardened and adhered to my skin. That was my last visit to a Halloween shop.
These last few weeks, that moment in the Halloween shop has been resurfacing in my memory at the sight of the neighborhood decorations and I am feeling uneasy at seeing them. When I asked God what I needed to know when it came to the subject of Halloween, he led me to the following scriptures:
Test everything. Hold on to the good. Avoid every kind of evil. (1 Thessalonians 5:21-22, NIV)
Dear friend, do not imitate what is evil but what is good. Anyone who does what is good is from God. Anyone who does what is evil has not seen God. (3 John 1:11, NIV)
For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord. Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. (Ephesians 5:8-11, NIV)
Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Romans 12:2, NIV)
About the pictures:
Deer Lake Park (October 2010)