Halloween used to be a holiday that centered on little kids getting dressed up and going trick-or-treating. Now, adults have taken over the day, knocking down the children and turning Halloween into a gore-fest. Adults have injected both sex and violence into the day, with one-up-manship centered on how to outdo one’s neighbors in images of sado-masochistic horror.
That’s not just me talking, it’s “The Washington Post.” Read Terri Sapienza’s article entitled When Did Halloween Get So Gruesome? A sampling:
Next to the standard witches, ghosts and black cats, many specialty stores and catalogues are selling creepily realistic corpses, severed limbs and butchered body parts. One catalogue advertises an animated ghoul who can vomit into a barrel on cue (special order only, $2,750). An online company sells a Tortured Torso Prop (for $149) you can lean near your front door to welcome trick-or-treaters. . . .
Horchow, the high-end Neiman Marcus affiliate, sells fake buzzards and chocolate coffins. Target sells a 15-piece cemetery kit, a hanging grim reaper and an oversize maggot. Spirit Halloween, a Spencer’s specialty store, sells the Tortured Torso Prop and a child’s costume called Sailor of Death. Fright Catalog, seller of the Vomit Barrel, also serves up John Doe, a latex corpse with a hollow chest cavity for displaying a food buffet inside.. . .
Halloween has become much more adult-driven and sexualized, according to Paul J. Donahue, a clinical psychologist and the founder and director of Child Development Associates, a group practice that works primarily with children and families in Scarsdale, N.Y. Costumes sexual in nature have become more popular.
“We’re a culture of extremes,” Donahue said. “We have to push things. At Halloween it becomes a competition among adults to outdo and go further and further.”
The technical term for this is “decadence,” a sign of a culture in dissolution.
9 comments ↓
I used to try to defend Halloween, since it used to be just fun, and I don’t much care for people who see demons lurking in every cupboard and bookcase. But there’s not much to defend anymore. It’s been taken over by the Wiccans. Another innocent pleasure spoiled. (Sigh.)
I agree with Lars. It is out of hand and I am having an internal conflict over recognizing it. I have three kids (7, 5 & 2), they don’t know about the really nasty stuff. They want to be princesses and superheroes - fun stuff. But if I don’t stop it now, how to I stop it later when they may find the really outrageous stuff interesting.
I’d leave the forbidding, Joe, till it’s the only road to take.
Let them have their fun while they’re kids, Joe, while you continue to point them in the right direction.
Halloween hype is another example of many wrong things: hostility to not only religion, but to decency itself; and the ever-enlarging number of adults who can’t stop acting like adolescents, to name only two.
It’s literally taking the candy from the babies.
Halloween started out pagan and is returning to its roots. Maybe the churches should start doing All Saints day on November 1st.
I have fond memories of Halloween as a child. One year I was a jawa from Star Wars. The next I was Buck Rogers. I even went as a werewolf and a vampire.
Then people started getting paranoid. One started getting suggestions to dress as a bible character. You got invites to tribulation haunted houses. At the other extreme where the people running around in Jason Masks with Chain saws. I still remember the one house where the guy jumped out of the bushes in the mummy outfit. He almost made me drop my candy. I was up on the stoop so his face was at my foot level. Maybe I broke his nose.
Our daughter is just 5 months old. We are excited to be back in the Halloween game. My wife got her a Jack O Lantern costume. We have the Neighborhood Rec. Center Party and two Grandma Houses to stop by.
Perhaps we might like to consider the possibilities that the celebration of “Halloween” has always been pagan, a celebration of lost and/or evil “spirits”, and in conflict with the church’s celebration of All Saints Day on 1 November.
A long time ago I was a little girl. There was no such event as “Trick or Treat”.
Dr. Luther tacked the Ninety-Five Theses on the church door in Wittenberg on October 31,1517.
The words contained therein have echoed around the world since and have been cherished by those who thank God each day for the work of this Augustian monk.
It seems rather more appropriate for Christian parents to commemorate *this* historic event on 31 October with their children.
Happy Reformation Day.
I like the more innocent side of Halloween. I can see the darker side, though. I think that Dr. Veith is right in noticing a shift from the kid’s holiday to that for the adults. Now, I think that adults getting into this from time to time is one thing. I’m not even bothered by a company selling realistic looking macabre items. I’m more bothered by the idea of some adults buying from them year after year.
My favorite adult—or should I say grown-up?—celebration of Halloween was some years back when a roommate of mine and I invited lots of people over to read ghost stories aloud. The two of us took turns reading Sleepy Hollow, which took longer than I had expected. A good ghost story and a mug of hot cider. That’s my recommendation.
I read somewhere that reading ghost stories is an English Christmas custom, and that that is how A Christmas Carol came about. Well, we do need some good occasion to read stuff like this.
The name Halloween betrays its Christian roots. i do believe there used to be a holiday called sam ain, that fell on the same day, and was pagan. But Halloween is Christian. Don’t let the wiccan’s take it over. Next you will let the shopping malls take over Christmas.
Go ahead celebrate the day, but reclaim it’s Christian meaning.
I did some research on this a few years ago for a speach class. It turns out that it was a baptist pastor in New York that didn’t like the Catholic Irish that first started the whole “It’s a satanic holiday bit.” No coubt the way some celebrate it, it is. But that doesn’t mean it has to be.
“Nothing wrong with baptized kids parading costumes and taunting the Devil,” as Dr. Gard at Ft. Wayne, once said.
Bror (@7), certainly the name Halloween (a contraction of All Hallow’s Eve) is Christian, but that doesn’t mean all of the origins of the day are. Best I can tell, Halloween is one of many examples in which the (Catholic) church attempted to Christianize popular heathen customs (cf. goddess worship/Mary, pantheism/adoration of saints, and possibly Sol Invictus/the date chosen for Christmas). Here is what Wikipedia has to say on the matter (note that they cite an LCMS Web site!):
As with so many other Christianization attempts, I’m not sure it succeeded in actually focusing people on Christ, but rather convinced them that they could keep up their traditions and now view them as God-pleasing. As has been discussed here in different contexts (cf. worship services), Christian outreach seems to do best when it trumpets Christianity’s difference, rather than saying, “Oh, yes, we’re just like you pagan folks — we have that holiday, too!”
Regardless, it is good to focus on the Christian holiday of All Saints, and harmless to celebrate Halloween within reason.
Interesting new idea that started up around here this year, and it goes along with the original intent of the post: One company in our town this year is offering “coffin rides”. They have a coffin hooked up to a motion simulator and you get in and then have the lid closed. The ride simulates a coffins trip from a funeral to the cemetery, being lowered 6 feet into the ground, having dirt thrown on top, and then about a minute of complete silence. For fun, there’s a camera inside so your friends can watch all of your reactions.
As I told my wife, this is something I’ll do once, but it’ll be real, and it’ll only be my body that goes through it, not me.
Interesting concepts that people design nowadays.
Leave a Comment