Martinsville Bulletin, Inc.
P. O. Box 3711
204 Broad Street
Martinsville, Virginia 24115
276-638-8801
Toll Free: 800-234-6575
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Sunday, November 1, 2009
By HOLLY KOZELSKY - Bulletin Accent Editor
In their zeal to keep kids from celebrating Halloween, are churches accidentally making it into an even better and more exciting holiday?
Many churches protest aspects of Halloween. They don’t think kids should be dressing or playing in costumes as evil characters. They don’t want kids to celebrate a holiday with some non-Christian origins. They want to protect kids from potential dangers of traffic or strangers while trick-or-treating.
To give kids a better deal, then, they throw parties or candy giveaways that promise more fun or candy than traditional trick-or-treating. There are many such events: Trunk-or-treating, Carnivals for Christ, fall festivals and Hallelujah Nights are just a few examples.
Rather than discouraging or distracting from Halloween, however, these events seem to be redefining it into a night involving parties and way more candy than kids used to get just 10 and 20 years ago.
Remember the simple Halloweens of days gone by?
You’d dress up and walk to each neighbor’s house. It was a great chance for visiting.
Each neighbor would give you one piece of candy, except for the few renegades who would give two. By the time you got home, you’d have a bag of candy small by today’s standards, but good enough for back then.
Cars have robbed neighborhoods of that closeness. Taking kids around in cars to other areas to get candy destroys interactions among neighbors and turns Halloween into a grab-all-you-can free-for-all.
Now, parties further chip away from the neighborhood friendliness of Halloween. What image does “trunk-or-treating” give other than candy and cars? Where is the emphasis on visiting with people?
True, churches use a lot of special wording to be sure people know they are not celebrating Halloween, but rather are giving an alternative to it.
But think of things from a kid’s point of view. Do you think kids are going to be all caught up in word games?
Nope. They don’t care what you call it. They know Halloween is coming, and in their mind, there’s a great Halloween party going on at church.
Furthermore, how confusing can it be that a holiday churches say is not religious starts being pegged as a party for Jesus?
We adults can explain it away to each other all we want, but meanwhile, kids are growing up thinking that Halloween is a holiday for Jesus just like Easter and Christmas. It doesn’t have presents like Christmas, but it has a better party and a whole lot more candy than Easter.
In their attempts to squash Halloween, churches actually are glorifying it by taking it beyond a simple visit among neighbors (if the practice of parents driving kids around town hasn’t destroyed that first).
There’s nothing wrong with changing the way Halloween or any holiday is celebrated. Societies throughout time have continually revised ways holidays are observed.
Churches just shouldn’t be surprised, though, if they come to notice that instead of quelching Halloween, their actions just glorify it into a bigger deal than it otherwise would have been.
What if this generation of kids, when they are all grown up, protest Halloween-alternative events? What if they scratch their heads and say, “Wait a minute, why is the church making such a big deal out of a pagan holiday?”
That’s just something to ponder over the next few days as we try to keep out of the kids’ candy bags. |
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