Like almost all Americans of my generation, I grew up celebrating Halloween.  It was a Big Deal, in fact.  There was much consideration of costumes, which generally were homemade, not store-bought.  I only remember one of mine – my least favorite:  green pants, a green gingham blouse and a plastic jack o’ lantern on my head.  Bo-ring!  One of the best years was when one of my older teen brothers and his friends dressed in drag.  (Back then, it was just funny, and didn’t carry the connotations it does today.  I must say, Gary made a homely girl!)  My elementary school held a big carnival with games, a cake walk, hay rides, and assorted other entertainments, well-attended by the surrounding community.  Then it was off to trick-or-treat, hordes of youngsters roaming the streets door to door from dusk till past bedtime.  We knew which neighbors were the most generous with their candy, which house gave only one little piece of Bit O’Brickle, who made the best (and worst) popcorn balls.

Once in junior high, of course, I was too old for trick-or-treating.  (We had moved by then to Utah, where it was, in fact, normal to continue doing it through junior high, but that just felt too weird to me.)  They didn’t have the big school carnivals.  The one big celebration was the party held by our church youth group, so at least there was still something to celebrate with lots of candy.   (My sweet tooth knows no bounds!)

However, as I was helping to set up for the party in my sophomore year, I had an epiphany.  I was putting up the usual decorations in the church basement – black and orange crepe paper and cutouts of orange pumpkins, yellow haystacks, black cats with backs arched and straight-up tails, huge, black, ugly spiders and their webs, and black witches on brooms or at their cauldrons.  Suddenly, I was hit by the monstrous incongruity of it all.  I was putting up images of WITCHES on the walls of a house of GOD!  Oh, sure, it was the basement, not the sanctuary.  Oh, sure, the images were comic stereotypes, not something from the occult.  Oh, sure, it was all “just in fun”, not something serious.  I could hear all the excuses given to justify what I was doing – and they were all meaningless.  What has Darkness to do with Light?

That was the last time I had anything to do with celebrating Halloween.  I began a journey of discovery to find out what Halloween really is about, both its historical roots and its modern practice.  (I won’t go into it here; you can find it yourself easily enough by checking out “Samhain”.  The fact that the hallmarks of the celebration of the holiday involve the glorification of everything that is ghoulish, evil, twisted, frightening, and occultic should be a tip-off to its true nature.)

Unfortunately, I became a zealot about the subject.  I got more and more upset as the day approached.  I’d try to do as little shopping as possible in the month of October so I could avoid the inevitable displays and the “Happy Halloween” of the clerks.  I got angry at other Christians for participating in Halloween, condemned churches who tried to “redeem” the holiday by having a “Holy House” instead of a “haunted house” or in some other way holding a “Halloween that we’ll call something else” celebration.  I spent the day itself feeling that I could hear Satan laughing at how many Christians he had celebrating HIS holiday.

God finally brought me to see, though, that what I was doing was actually STILL giving that day an importance it didn’t deserve.  So what if Satan has his day of celebration?  Satan’s lost the war and he knows it.  He has no more power that day than any other.  I don’t make a big deal of the holidays of any other religion, so why make a big deal of an occultic one?  More importantly, God brought me to see that I was letting my hatred for that holiday fuel a self-righteous condemnation of my brothers and sisters who didn’t happen to share my view of it!   Because my conscience told me not to celebrate it, I sat in judgment against everyone else’s conscience.  Satan’s happy either way, you know, whether we sin by doing what our conscience tells us we shouldn’t, or by condemning others for doing what OUR conscience won’t let US do, but that their conscience is at ease with.  In condemning fellow Christians for, as I saw it, playing Satan’s game by celebrating his holiday, I was, myself, playing his game!  Wow.  Win for the Enemy all around, huh?

I decided to change the focus of the day.  Instead of honoring Halloween/Samhain, we started celebrating Reformation Day.  It was on October 31^st , 1517, that Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg church challenging all comers to a debate regarding the sale of papal indulgences, in what is generally regarded as the starting point of the Protestant Reformation.  That seemed an appropriate thing to commemorate.  (We turn off all the lights in the front of the house, ignore the doorbell, rent a movie or two to watch, and feast on many sweet and unwholesome things.  I do love my candy!)

Of greatest consequence, I changed my attitude.  In Romans 14:4, Paul, addressing the issue of conscience, says “Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another?  It is before his own master that he stands or falls.  And he will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make him stand.”  I will freely confess that I still don’t understand what other Christians find to celebrate in Halloween, but if I want the freedom to NOT celebrate, I must acknowledge their freedom to do so if their conscience is clear before the Lord about it.  I still wish churches would ignore the day, just as they do Ramadan, or Tet, or the holidays of any other religion, but as the saying goes, it’s “no skin off my back” if they do, because I have the freedom not to participate.  I no longer feel the need to be confined to that hard, narrow judge’s bench.

The trick to living in freedom is to treat others’ freedom as dearly as your own!