The God Squad: Halloween is fun and unifying

I have received many questions lately from religious parents of all faiths who are not completely comfortable with allowing their children to celebrate Halloween. The holiday’s pagan past disturbs them, and they feel somehow that a victory for Halloween trick-or-treating is a defeat for their faith. Every year, I try to gently comfort them. Herewith, I present this year’s effort:

Holidays come in three forms: purely religious holidays, holidays that are purely secular and holidays with a mixed history.

Secular holidays don’t present a problem for most religious folk, although there still are some issues. Many Muslim friends have told me that Thanksgiving turkey meals have not won universal acceptance in the Muslim community. However, even this is changing as more Muslims become more assimilated into the secular holiday cycle of America. Independence Day and New Year’s Day (and should we add Super Bowl Sunday?) are all easy and non-controversial secular holidays.

Religious holidays include Ramadan, Easter and Yom Kippur. These holidays are also not controversial; the only people who should celebrate them are people who believe in the teachings of that religion. Those outside the faith can, of course, be invited as guests and observers but not as celebrants.

I’m grateful to have been invited to many Iftar feasts celebrating the end of Ramadan. My dear friend Fr. Tom Hartman shared many joyous Passover seder meals with me and my family, and I’ve been known to sneak a candy Easter egg or two into my pocket from Tommy’s Easter baskets with the neon green plastic grass. In all these instances, it’s enough to be a welcome guest.

The problem for some religious people comes with the third group of holidays. These are what I call mixed holidays that may have had religious elements but have long since been transmogrified into mainly secular celebrations. Halloween and Christmas are the two prime examples.

Before we get to Halloween, let’s consider Christmas. The secular Christmas argument is that there’s nothing religious about Santa and his flying reindeer, Christmas trees (without a creche) or presents for kids. Christmas is a national holiday, so they argue, and despite its obvious Christian roots and constant meaning as the birthday of the Messiah, Christmas has become a secular celebration.

I understand these arguments and sympathize with them and with all children who suffer from Christmas-tree envy. However, I do not and cannot agree. My main problem with non-Christians celebrating Santa-ized Christmas is that they’re distorting the real meaning of the day by secularizing it. Christ should be put back into Christmas, not taken out. Christ, not Santa, is the focus of Christmas.

It may seem like a close call to some, but I think twinkly trees should be reserved for those who know what the light really represents to believing Christians. I don’t become apoplectic about a Christmas tree in the Goldberg house, but I’m definitely not going to help decorate it. The only lights I’m thinking about in December are the lights in my house that I hope don’t go out in the next storm.

Now, on to Halloween. Let me say this simply: I love Halloween! I have absolutely no spiritual compunctions about the fact that Halloween is an old pagan holiday originally called Samhain (pronounced, I believe, Sah-ween), the pre-Christian Celtic festival of the dead.

Halloween is not about idolatry. Halloween is about costumes and parties and pumpkins and children running around the neighborhood scarfing candy from neighbors who are happy to toss a few glucose goodies into their plastic pumpkins. Halloween is about building a national community celebration that produces national cultural cohesion.

In a way, Halloween is even better than Thanksgiving (my absolute favorite holiday) because Thanksgiving divides us into separate households, while Halloween unites us into bands of candy bandits. There should be a holiday when we all do the same thing together as Americans, and Halloween is it.

Halloween also provides a perfect rite of passage for American children becoming young adults. I ask kids all the time, “At what age did you stop going trick-or-treating?” The answer is usually late adolescence, which is in fact the time when children should begin to look forward in their lives with the bittersweet knowledge that they won’t be children forever.

I apologize to those who think religious leaders should be the shock troops fighting any idolatrous tendencies in the culture, but for me, candy and running through crunchy leaves is a memory that lives in the best part of my heart (and several cavities in my teeth). Happy Halloween!

(Send questions only to The God Squad via email at godsquadquestion@aol.com.)