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Samhain

All Saints, Halloween

Halloween does not have to be evil

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Every year on Halloween many Americans become anxious. Not from the possibility of their houses being “toilet papered” or “egged”, but from sinister evil that lurks on this devilish holiday. It wasn’t long ago that we told kids to be on the lookout for razors in candy.

So much of Halloween’s harrowing tales are ingrained from movies and television, in which malevolent characters on a quest for death and destruction: scary masked men, evil spirits, or a machete yielding murderer runs a muck. Many people enjoy the thrill of a scary movie and see Halloween as benign but others truly believe Halloween to be an evil affair.

Some of the supposed origins of Halloween came from a pre-medieval Celtic pagan festival, Samhain. Those who celebrated this festival on the heels of the summer, believed that the world of the living and the dead were thinly divided on or about October 31. Agricultural duties were carried out to prepare for winter. Some rituals were preformed to placate evil spirits. It is difficult to know what exactly happened during Samhain because we do not have any credible ancient first-hand accounts. Later pagans and Celtic people recaptured the festival in other localized traditions.

The word “Halloween” has nothing to do with Samhain or evil occult practices. Early Christians contextualized European winter celebrations into All Saints Day as a way to remember and honor faithful Christian saints. The day before All Saints was celebrated as “All Hallows Eve” and the phrase morphed into Hallowe’en or just Halloween. Modern celebrations of Christmas, Easter, and Epiphany are all contextualized holidays that honor Christian beliefs. Local pagan practices were replaced with Christian ones, in order to help express Christ in local forms to local peoples. By separating All Hallows Eve from the pre-Christian practices, Christians can take comfort in understanding the historical Christian remembrance that is associated with All Hallows Eve and All Saints Day.

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All Saints, Halloween

Should Christians Celebrate Halloween?

With Halloween upon us all the ghosts, witches, and ghouls come to play… err, trick-or-treat.  Poorly made scary movies run non-stop on TV. Millions will give out candy to kids and people will participate in those zombie 5ks. Adults spend about $6.7 billion a year for parties, costumes, and candy. With Americans spending that much money on this festive holiday, is there a sinister evil moving among us, pushing us to celebrate a poorly documented holiday?

There is more to Halloween than we think. Many have made Halloween to be an evil day, which has not always been evil since its inception. What started as a Christian day to prepare for All Saints’ Day (November 1st), Halloween became a spooky, evil, and candy filled observance.  The term “Halloween” from its beginnings, had nothing to do with any pagan or evil beliefs.  The Christian festival All Hallows Eve morphed into our current word Hallowe’en.

Many believe Halloween is associated with the pagan concept of Samhain, a Gaelic harvest festival in which the beginning of the year and worlds of the living and dead would be thinly divided. It’s true, early Christians converted this practice and aligned it with a Christian observance.

The fact is we don’t really know what happened in the Samhain harvest festival.  We have historical records that roughly inform us what the festival was about, but nothing certain. Regardless, the question remains, can Christians celebrate this “evil” holiday?

Professor of philosophy at Biola University (a Christian university), John Mark Reynolds helps us understand how Christians can reject the overtly evil undertones of Halloween:

Christians have the right to reject [the pagan] interpretation. My neighbor’s celebration of Halloween as a pagan festival does not require me to lose All Hallows Eve, because of course in the actual historical memory of the West that is what Halloween is.  The day after All Hallows, Christians celebrate the lives of the greatest of the faithful who have died and gone to God. On All Hallows the fact that we will all die is brought home to us. We do fear death, but rejoice in the victory of Christ over death. The costumes and the joy poke fun at the diabolic, they do not embrace it.

Thomas More once said that the Devil cannot stand to be mocked.    By spending the night of October 31 filled with fear over what evils might be occurring (and sometimes are), we live in the fear that Satan wants us to live in. By laughing, mocking, and even “cartooning” evil with goofy costumes we can take a posture of triumph with Christ.

We Christians certainly should not take light the power of evil. We do not practice occult activities of the paranormal, but the evils of this world are real. Prostitution, human trafficking, children dying of starvation, murder, and torture are the real evils of this world. We Christians should not fear a kid who wears a Sponge Bob costume and spends a night with his friends enjoying candy. Certainly, there are greater evils than an underwater sponge.

Is Halloween evil? It is, if you want it to be evil. The truth is All Hallows Eve (Halloween, the Christian practice of it) was corrupted.  Christians can take comfort in understanding the historical Christian remembrance that is associated with All Hallows Eve and All Saints Day.  Teaching our children to remember the “saints” of our lives and the Christian witness encourages us to celebrate All Saints Day. Christians can even make Halloween fun for children by having events in churches or in our communities where children and their parents can dress up, play games, remember our “saints” and share some treats in a safe place.

Halloween, new

7 Reasons why a Christian can celebrate (and remake) Halloween


Can there be a Christian Halloween? Can a Christian celebrate Halloween, which honors ghouls, demons, ghosts, and everything that goes bump in the night dangerous or even evil?

Somewhere, in the halls of history, Halloween or All Hallows Eve, got hijacked.  What started as a day to prepare for All Saints’ Day (November 1st), Halloween became a spooky, evil, and candy filled observance.  The term “Halloween” from its beginnings, had nothing to do with any pagan or evil beliefs.  The Christian festival All Hallows Eve morphed into our current term Hallowe’en.

The key in understanding of the origins of the term Halloween comes from the sense of what is “hallowed” or “holy”.  In the Lord’s Prayer, Christians pray, “Our Father, in heaven, hallowed be your name…”  In the fourth century, John Chrysostom tells us that the Eastern church celebrated a festival in honor of all saints who died. In the seventh and eighth centuries, Christians celebrated “All Saints’ Day” formally.

How did Halloween become associated with evil spirits?  When we look at history we discover:

More than a thousand years ago Christians confronted pagan rites appeasing the lord of death and evil spirits… the druids, in what is now Britain and France, observed the end of summer with sacrifices to the gods. It was the beginning of the Celtic year, and they believed Samhain, the lord of death, sent evil spirits abroad to attack humans, who could escape only by assuming disguises and looking like evil spirits themselves. The waning of the sun and the approach of dark winter made the evil spirits rejoice and play nasty tricks.

If the Christian observance of Halloween began with a religious focus, how can we reclaim and celebrate Halloween from its current feared status?  Here are 7 ways Christians can take back Halloween:

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