I say, "Boo" to this day, not on this day. I hate Halloween. I truly, completely, utterly hate Halloween.
As a child, I don't think I ever got to dress up as something I wanted to be. That's probably because I always wanted to be The Little Mermaid or Jasmine, but had to be something my mother could sew up for me. I remember being Betsy Ross. You know, because every seven year old girl longs to be a woman she's never heard of. There was the time I was the Queen of Hearts. I think she chose that because I don't like people. Again, I would have rather been Ariel. One year I was a Native American girl. My mother went through a phase of bead weaving. Yup, I wore my well tailored, home-made costumes year after year. And the clowns!! My brother and I were matching clowns one year. How could I forget?! Close one. But as we got older we were allowed to pick our costumes. When we moved to Massachusetts, we actually had a yard and a home that we could decorate. My mother had rules on that as well. By the time I reached middle school, I knew my mother's expectations. No witches, no ghosts, and nothing scary. It was true of our costumes as well as the house. And it wasn't until this age that she began to tell me why. Halloween is time that lines are blurred. We take things like witches and turn them into cute little beings. Truth is, witches are real. And they are not cute! Witches are practicing magic. People seem to think that this is all made up. What seems to bug me about it is the amount of Christians that don't believe witches are real. Have you read the Bible? Moses and Pharoah. Moses has God's miracles and wonders. Pharoah has magicians! Over and over we see the warnings against magic, sorcery, and such. It's all a part of Satan worship. I will never forget the first day I encountered a witch. I was in sixth grade. My brother was in the marching band and so my mother decided to take me to the football game. We entered the gate and I saw two high school girls. One of them stared at me the entire way. She kept her eyes on me even as I turned. I could feel her staring. We sat in the stands and I looked over at her. Her eyes never left me. I said something to my mother quietly. Her response was, "They're witches." I was in shock! They looked like normal teenagers. My mother knew the other girl. It was a girl who had a crush on my brother in middle school. They had class together a lot. He knew that she had been practicing witchcraft with this other girl and had spoken to my mother about it. We talked about it in the car. I struggled with the fact that they stared at me. Out of all the coming and going, why stare at me. And my mother knew they answer - "They know you're a Christian." See, those girls had given themselves over to Satan and his demons. The girls in their own sense didn't know, but the ones that they gave themselves to did. And they didn't like us. There was an actual spiritual battle going on that afternoon. And in that moment I was confused and scared. But as an adult, I look back and think about what type of battling was going on that I couldn't see? How much was my mother praying right then and there. What angels fought in my stead. I knew at the age of twelve that this was not something to mess around with. In other words, I backed my mother on her decision to decorate for fall and not pretend to be something against the Bible. Even after that, I wasn't a fan of Halloween. Don't get me wrong, I loved getting candy. And even once I was able to choose my own outfits and go trick-or-treating with just my friends I thought it would be different. It wasn't. Turned out, I didn't like dressing up. I fought back and forth with it. I've tried to get into costume as an adult. "It's fun!" people shout. I don't find it fun. I find it cumbersome. I just want to wear clothes and eat candy. For me, a scary costume would be "sexy" anything and not putting on make-up. People would run and hide. (More for me!) I don't have the desire to dress up and be somebody else. I think I finally figured it out a few years ago. Ready for the epiphany? I spent so many years pretending to be someone I wasn't in everyday life, that I didn't feel like adding another mask. Then parenthood came along. Now I have the continual chance to teach my children about it. Witches are real. Ghosts are not. Skeletons are real, but they aren't for Halloween like you think. Bats are real. Zombies are not. Back and forth we go. Then I explain to them why I don't like Halloween. I don't care for how people make less of things that are actually terrible. Then we decide that we will trick-or-treat for the "fun" of dressing up and to get candy. Every year I hand out treats to the kids that come by even though I don't want to. I know that I'm condoning all of it. I fear getting egged, honestly. My heart becomes scrambled between what I want to do - sit inside and watch TV- and what I do - send my kids and husband around our neighborhood for the good candy and hand out the junk candy they bring back. This conflict within me is what makes me hate this holiday even more. If I just say, "Oh it's just kids having fun and getting candy," then I glaze over all of the other things that Halloween is. The point of All Hallows Eve was that the Celts held a Samhain festival and wore masks to scare away ghosts. Yet we have turned our eyes to this so that we can wear costumes and get candy. I'm so confused! I don't see the connection. What I see is Mars and Hershey sitting around a table saying, "Ya know, we need to sell some more candy. Summertime melts it all and we're losing profit. What holiday is close by? Festival of Samhain? Sure let's make people give candy to kids in masks. Great." Then some guy named Hallmark said, "hmm, I need to sell cards about love..." This whole holiday seems ridiculous. There are families that don't participate because they know the history and don't want to be a part of "ghosts". There are families that participate as we do, with knowledge and truth and a desire for Reese's. There are families that go to the extreme and try their best to scare the patrons looking for a sweet treat. It's because of all of this that I just can't get behind Halloween. The upside of Halloween, besides the Reese's, is that I have an opportunity every year to discuss things with my children that I normally wouldn't bring up. When we go for a walk and see the decorations, they might say something like, "Yeah but those things aren't real" and we can discuss. We do a history lesson on All Hallow's Eve year after year so that they understand where all of this madness came from. It opens up a line of communication that I wouldn't normally bring up. So I can find the good. And the kids do enjoy dressing up in costumes as much as I despise it. So, I guess they aren't acting like someone else all year long.
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