The Halloween dilemma

Around this time of year a big conversation always ensues at coffee hours, on email lists, everywhere. What do you do about Halloween? Well, here's our solution. For the most part we don't celebrate Halloween. I know people do it just in good fun, and celebrations of the harvest and beautiful autumn are fun, but the truth is, Halloween is pretty ghoulish in our culture. Why do we feel the need to celebrate ghosts and goblins and blood and death? It's just asking for trouble in my book. After all, the demons love it when we ask for their involvement in our lives. Now, I have a house full of guys. We like battles, and we love to read about the martyrs (trust me, my boys LOVE a gory, bloody, heroic martyr story), but there is no need to force the issue of embracing deadly images. So, around here, every year in October we always go to a pumpkin patch, and we like to roast pumpkin seeds, make pumpkin pie, pumpkin biscuits, etc. I don't want my kids to feel too weird for not "doing" Halloween. They are weird in our culture in plenty of ways, and I do ask them to keep the fast and feasts despite what the world does around them. But I also worry about passing too much judgement on others by forcefully refusing fairly innocent celebrations. (Honestly, as a child my family did not participate in Halloween, and while I understood the decision and supported it, I always felt like the strange kid who didn't have a costume or anything.) So, if we are invited to costume parties through school or other activities during Halloween week, we'll quietly dress up and participate. But we don't do trick-or-treating events, nor do we do haunted houses, etc. On Halloween night, we go to Vespers, and then go out to eat as a family. (There is always lots of space in restaurants on Halloween night.) Afterwards, we all head to Target and everyone gets to choose a big bag of candy to take home. (Really, there is no need to deprive the kids of the candy! And that's easy to take care of.)

However, my kids (and I) absolutely LOVE, LOVE, LOVE to dress up. So - we have an Orthodox tradition of dressing up which we keep in December. For more info on our tradition see my blog entry from last year on St. Barbara's Day Festivities. And find information on the food for the festivities here.