By Holly Kozelsky
It’s getting time for the annual grab-all: Halloween.
There is no holiday better at teaching children to snatch selfishly at as much as they can get, and then to pig out in gluttony.
Ironically, this lesson in morality comes from a well-meaning source which most definitely has not intended this consequence: the church.
Decades ago — during the Age of Innocence, when I was a child, and you may have been, too – Halloween meant making or buying a costume and wearing it to go trick-or-treating.
We’d dress up and go up and down the streets, knocking on the doors of neighbors who had their porch lights on.
It was more than asking and receiving. Each trick-or-treat transaction was a brief and friendly visit with the neighbors, feeding and strengthening relationships.
Some of the neighbor ladies even gave us homemade baked goods, which were delicious and safe to eat.
As I became an older kid, I heard about something shocking: Some parents would drive their children through the neighborhoods of Mortgage Hill and the country club to get the expensive candy, and lots of it.
Those also were the early years of churches throwing Halloween parties. Of course, they gave them different names, such as “Holy-Eve” parties. The idea was to get the kids off the streets and into the church.
That is a worthy goal, but it backfired on a couple of fronts.
First, the kids somehow found time to do both, thus getting double (or more) of the candy.
Second, through the years these church parties became bigger and bigger until they went from being parties to being festivals.
This phenomenon reached its apex in Henry County about 15 to 20 years ago. A couple of churches here held festivals attended by thousands of children, and dozens upon dozens of other churches also offered fun and exciting trunk-or-treats and parties.
The result is a whole generation of children growing up valuing Halloween considerably more than Easter, which should be Christianity’s premier holiday.
Imagine if society and churches did up Easter the way they do up Halloween: Decorate lavishly a month or more in advance; have the fun and fantasy of dressing up in an Easter costume (instead of a scratchy dress and tights, hurtful shoes and restrictive suitcoats and ties); celebrate at parties in the evening (instead of going to Sonrise services earlier than you normally get out of bed – cranky and exhausted); and getting several times the amount of candy than normally comes in a standard Easter basket.
