Reflections on Halloween

"Have you come to sing pumpkin carols?"

As “Spooky Month” comes to a close, and I think on Halloween, a million different things come to mind. For some, it’s a time of silly fun and celebration that culminates in a sugar rush that won’t be rivaled for another year. For others, it’s a celebration of all things horror, and a month-long festival full of ghost stories, folktales, slashers, and Halloween marathons.

If you’re religious, Christian in particular, it may mean “fall” or “harvest” festivals that were just non-spooky Halloween-themed events (or, “Hell Houses” if you’re one of those extremist fundamentalist types). Or, maybe you simply celebrated the traditional Church festivals of All Hallows’ Eve or Reformation Day — the day Martin Luther nailed the 95 Thesis and broke off from the Catholic Church.

Whichever camp you fall into, like with any holiday, everyone has their own distinct experience with Halloween, even if it’s just that you did nothing at all.

My childhood memories of Halloween are complicated. Not because they’re bad or negative, or because I’m ashamed of them in any way, but because, frankly, it feels as if I didn’t have one simple Halloween experience, I had several.

In my formative years, our household looked a lot like your average Midwestern American home. Dad went to work, Mom stayed home with us, an American flag flew on our front porch, and we celebrated Halloween just like anybody else. In fact, we did all the fun fall festivities that you could imagine, from apple picking to corn mazes. Though, of all the fall festivities, my favorite tradition was probably our annual visits to The Lindberg Pumpkin Patch.

The Pumpkin Patch was always a treat. There were two different haunted houses (one being actually spooky, the other inflatable), a hey-maze, some burlap-sack slides, a gift shop full of monster memorabilia, and a slingshot where you could shoot a small pumpkin as far as you could. Usually, I’d be on the ground aiming them as close to a 90-degree angle as I could. I’d rather see how high they’d go than how far. It was always one of the best parts of this time of year.

But, by far, the best thing about going to the Patch was that we’d probably go home with a new Frank Fiorello book. Fiorello might not be a familiar name to you, but he was a local legend to us. Originally from Rockford, Illinois (not far from our hometown in St. Charles), he has written and illustrated 10 different children’s books, most of which are about Halloween. We always loved Fiorello’s books, and the promise of a new one the next year was certainly exciting. In fact, we even got a few of them signed, complete with little doodles beside his signature.

Growing up, our neighborhood seemed to go all-out for Halloween. Some of the houses were known to be too spooky for us, and my siblings and I wouldn’t dare walk up to the front door. Given that I don't have much of a sweet tooth, especially for candy, looking back it's unclear why I ever enjoyed trick-or-treating in the first place. Maybe it was the thrill of being up past our bedtime or the excitement of seeing our neighborhood in a different light (or darkness?), but, more than likely, I think that it was because we got to dress up…

While I don’t remember every costume I wore growing up, the first one I do remember is a Dracula-inspired vampire, complete with white make-up, black eye shadow, fake teeth, and a cape. I’d also been Batman, Mike Wazowski from Monsters, Inc., Elvis Prestley, the Green Power Ranger from Power Rangers Ninja Storm, Batman Beyond (yes, a different character), Darth Vader from Star Wars, and… Huh, I guess that’s all I can remember.

Trick-or-treating was fun, but there was always a limit, a threshold at which we inevitably got too tired, too bored, or too cold. Or, a combination of all three. Truthfully, it was always the most fun when we were younger, and by the time our family stopped celebrating Halloween, I didn’t seem to care too much at all.

It wasn’t until my wife and I began dating that I wore a Halloween costume for the first time in probably over a decade. She went as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and I went as the ensouled vampire Spike, and our outfits were on-point. Besides going to a Halloween party that our church was throwing for college students (a safer, non-alcoholic alternative to the MSU fraternity raves), we also ventured to the outskirts of Bozeman, Montana where we went to this terrifying haunted house put on by a local middle school. In truth, my younger sister was probably the bravest of all of us.

But in the years between, I didn’t celebrate Halloween hardly at all. Sure, every October I’d make sure to play "Monster Mash” and “Ghostbusters,” catch the Scooby-Doo marathons on Cartoon Network or Boomerang, and rewatch the Halloween-themed episodes of some of my favorite shows (one of which I wrote about recently here), but that was about it. Some thought it was weird or strange that our family went from going trick-or-treating like anybody else to not participating at all, but it never really bothered me.

Wishing to “avoid the appearance of evil,” my parents essentially banned Halloween in our home based on its modern connections to all things vile, monstrous, and deathly. And that wasn’t to mention the alleged connections to Samhain. But this didn’t mean that we didn’t do many of the fall-related things. We would still go to The Pumpkin Patch, visit St. Charles’ annual Scarecrow Festival, and make time to watch It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. In fact, we’d even still carve pumpkins with friends! We just didn’t dress up or trick-or-treat.

Instead, we spent plenty of Halloween nights at Chuck-E-Cheese and being some of the only people there, we got our pick of all the best games. Naturally, this meant that I just camped out at the Star Wars game most of the night, at least until I got hungry. Since candy never appealed to me, pizza was always the better option.

But, in an effort to keep us from feeling left out, our Mom always got us an entire bag of the candy of our choice. For me, this meant Lifesaver Mints, and since I ate them fairly sporadically, there was plenty to go around. Eventually, I got so many bags that I had my own personal stockpile, a tradition that has continued to this day (just ask Hannah).

One Halloween, I distinctly remember gathering in our kitchen before dark to pray for those in our neighborhood, that nothing exceptionally evil would follow them home. Though I’ve continued this tradition up until this day (and will probably pray a similar prayer tomorrow), that night was different than all the rest. As we prayed, a white dove landed on our windowsill. Doves aren’t particularly common where we lived, and given that they’re often a symbol of the Holy Spirit in scripture, we took it as a sign.

I don’t know if that’ll ever happen again, but then we knew that God was with us, even on a night that often seemed so dark. Much like what I’ve been writing about these past few weeks, He’s always there to guide, protect, and comfort us, no matter if we recognize it or not. We would’ve believed that had the dove not perched beside our window, and we certainly believed it every Halloween after.

In the years, since, I’ve come to differing conclusions about Halloween. While I have no problem with those who abstain, I also don’t take issue with those (even Christians) who partake. Given that the earliest recorded celebrations of All Hallows’ Eve predate the pagan festival of Samhain (pronounced SOW-WEN) and the believe-it-or-not Christian history of Halloween, it doesn’t bother me as much as it used to. That said, I ain’t dressing up as the Devil, and I’ll continue to pray over those around us given that not everyone’s motives are pure on a night like that. Though, that’s true any time of the year.

(If you’d like to read more on the Christian history of Halloween, an online pastor friend of mine from West Virginia wrote a piece all about it that you can find here.)

Childhood memories are some of the most precious that we have because they not only shape us but, provided they’re positive, they’re moments we can look back on fondly when raising our own children. I’m excited for the first time we’ll dress the Little Miss up (probably as a moth given her natural inclination to all things bright), and for the memories we create with her as she grows up.

Maybe she’ll have a sweet tooth like her mother, or maybe she’ll be more like me, but either way, I hope that however we choose to engage with Halloween, she will look back fondly at our time together.

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This Week’s Petty Pick

The Conjuring is my favorite scary movie, and a great one to watch around the Halloween season. In fact, both sequels are pretty great too! Following Christian paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, this one is everything and more that you could ask for from a supernatural horror.

Based on a true story, The Conjuring chronicles the Warrens’ investigation into the haunting of the Perron family’s home in small-town Rhode Island. While horror isn’t always my thing, there’s no doubt that this is not only the genre at its best but filmmaking at its absolute finest.