Today I had a fairly heated discussion with someone quite dear to me and whom, perhaps until this disagreement today, I respected greatly. The topic is a very seasonal one: Halloween, or more specifically, a party which the mums in the Girl’s class have decided to organise for our daughters. The way we see it, it will be an occasion for the girls to be together, get dressed up (what little girl doesn’t like to dress up?!?), have a little bit of party food, run around, and generally get themselves nicely tired so that we can all enjoy a peaceful evening afterwards. Halloween is only a pretext, and given that this is a dress-up holiday par excellence, and that it falls during the half term, it seemed a no brainer to us. After all, this is just a bunch of four year-olds who deserve to have a bit of fun, given how many hours they now spend in school each day, and how much they are made to work during term time.
Unfortunately, some people in our church take a very radical view to Halloween, associating it with all manner of things evil, darkness, witchcraft and danger, and vociferate against it as if this were one of the most pernicious ills of our world. Our innocent children’s party is tarred with the same brush and seen to fall in the same category. I find an accusation like this almost too outrageous to deserve a response, and yet, because I am a Christian, and because I find this radical form of belief hugely off-putting, and precisely the kind of hard-headedness that I used to loathe about Christianity before I turned to it, I feel I need to address it openly.
In all manner of things, I am a staunch advocate of the measured approach. I have no time for any radical form of belief, and I have always believed that people should be allowed to make their own choices and do whatever they want, as long as they don’t hurt anyone else by it. My stance on Halloween is very much the same. I am no fan of the gory dress-up – I’ll pass on the mummies, murder victims, scary clowns like the protagonist of Stephen King’s It, the blood, the scattered brains and other such distasteful things, thank you very much! I am also not keen on the trick or treating, because, in my view, it is akin to begging, only made worse by the threat which is included in it, and which I find hard to take (“If you don’t give us a treat, we will trick you!”). However, these are my own reservations, and although I won’t let my own children go trick or treating and will not open the door to trick or treaters on the day, I have nothing against others taking part in the fun in their own way. And I certainly will not stop my children from dressing up, or from attending a Halloween party.
The intransigence I have encountered, though, gives rise to a much more pressing issue: how do I think Halloween should be viewed by a person of the faith, and is that faith not incompatible with it? Can you even call yourself a person of the faith if you engage in practices which seem to celebrate evil? As a medievalist, my answer to this has to be a resounding and unapologetic YES. This is, first and foremost, because the dress up is not and should never be seen as a celebration of evil, but rather a way of keeping it at bay by reducing its importance and marking it as something to be derided rather than scorned. The medieval mind was far better than us moderns at understanding contraries as part of the same whole, as facets of the same coin, whose interdependence is the very condition for true knowledge and understanding. Good and evil, darkness and light, day and night can only be defined one through the other, and denying one blindly can only skew our understanding of the other as well. Our church is purportedly dissociating oneself from all Halloween celebrations, and organising what it calls a ‘Light Party’, a celebration of light rather than the darkness it sees Halloween to be linked with. However, even basic logic tells us that you cannot deny something without acknowledging its existence, and refusing to name it only lends it an unnecessary magnitude. J.K. Rowling knew it well, when she created the frightening character of He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named: only Harry Potter, who was not afraid to call him by name, was able to defeat Voldemort. Naming evil, calling it out, bringing it out into the light, this is what will defeat it, not shining the light in the eyes of those who might look at it.
I have always been fascinated by the idea of the medieval carnival, which took place at various times throughout the year, and most importantly, on Shrove Tuesday, before the start of Lent, a period of abstinence and privation. Carnival was the time when the order of the world was reversed, when the lowly got to dress up as the rich, the rich allowed themselves to be derided, when natural impulses were let loose in a fulsome celebration of life itself. This was for only a day, and it was in a controlled environment (and this is something that some modern commentators view as a weakness), but it clearly provided a necessary outlet for pent-up tensions. If a pressure cooker has no valve to let off the steam, an explosion is bound to happen, and the same goes for all the negative impulses which are so intrinsically human. For me, a Halloween party is very much in the same vein: a controlled, safe way of letting off steam, a way of exploring the darkness in order better to keep it at bay, rather than embracing it.
I felt very gratified today when my husband showed me an article published by an Episcopalian Church in America, which echoes very similar thoughts to my own here (for those who are interested, here is the link to it). The article points out that the celebration of All Saints’ Day (or All Hallow’s) on November 1 is almost as old as the Church itself, going back to the eighth century, and the practices associated with the night before it (All Hallow’s Eve) go back almost equally as far and have a very positive history in the Church, rather than being entirely alien and antagonistic to it. So what if Halloween practices have some roots in pagan celebrations? So do other liturgical celebrations such as Christmas and Easter, and the meaning that they have, or their spiritual power, are none the weaker for it. Dressing up as demons, monsters and witches was never a way of embracing evil, but rather a way of laughing evil and death in the face, at denying their power over us. After all, if we are true believers, we cannot deny the fact that Jesus came to this world to defeat evil and to bring His Light to the world once and for all, and Christmas and Easter are celebrations of His triumph.
Evil is not an external entity which battles and seeks to destroy good; rather, we all have the potential to fall into it, like Lucifer who, himself, was a fallen angel. The way to eradicate it is not turning our face from it or sweeping it under the carpet, but rather confronting it, thereby taking away its power. Yes, there are evil people in the world, horrible things do happen, and some of those who like to think they have connections with the occult and the powers of darkness will try to reinforce that connection this Halloween as ever. However, for me, dressing up for Halloween or having a party on the day is not a celebration of evil but, rather like the carnival, a parody of the darkness meant better to affirm the power of light. Rather than refusing to partake in any of the fun, thereby risking to appear inflexible, narrow-minding and uninviting, the Church could re-appropriate the celebrations, harnessing their power and using them as a way of bringing people back into its midst instead of pushing them away. As another article I have come across today points out, it seems much better to redeem Halloween and those who partake in it, instead of vilifying them completely.
Post scriptum: To be fair, none of these issues will come even close to crossing the mind of the Girl or any of her little friends, I’m sure. After all, they are only four years old, the problem of evil has not even come onto their radar yet, they are entirely pure and innocent and I would quite like it to stay that way for as long as possible. For the Girl, witches are the protagonists of Room on the Broom and the Winnie the Witch series, fun, loveable and – most importantly – fictional characters, rather than anything she needs to be afraid of, and monsters are the shadows cast by her night-lamp onto the walls, and which sometimes prevent her from going to sleep. The Girl is very smart and logical, and refusing to allow her to partake in the Halloween fun for reasons such as the ones outlined above would require a convincing explanation of the dangers of evil. Even if I did agree with this position (which I don’t), I would much rather leave such a discussion for much later in her life, when she is emotionally strong enough to deal with something of this magnitude. For now, I’m quite happy to let her make-believe with witches, princesses, fairies and other magical creatures from the world of stories, which give her own world more colour and fun and stimulate her creativity. By denying her the chance to take part in the fun, I would only alienate her and turn Halloween into the forbidden fruit – precisely the opposite effect from the one my church claims to try to achieve. I would never celebrate darkness, that is without doubt, but neither will I shun the party or the dress-up: for me, this is simply allowing my child to be a child, and all the philosophical arguments can wait until she is old enough to come to her own conclusions on the topic.
woodsofwhite 
