WHAT WOULD YOU SAY: Should Christians (or Anybody Else) Celebrate Halloween?
(5:42 VIEWING) — If you grew up anywhere in America in the last century, you celebrated Halloween as a kid, putting on your costume, grabbing a bag to fill with candy, and joining friends to walk the neighborhood house-to-house.
Sure, people dressed up as ghosts, skeletons, vampires, mass murderers, witches and other ghastly characters, but everybody knew it was all in fun, right? So what’s the hard, you might be asking.
What kind of ghoul will you be this year? (Screenshot from YouTube).
In the latest “What Would You Say?” video from the Colson Center, we are reminded that Halloween as we know it here in the U.S. stems from an old Christian holiday known as All Hallows Day, which was celebrated on November 1. The night before was All Hallows Eve, thus “Hall-ow-een.”
But in the early 1900s, as the ghosts and goblins replaced the old holiday, Halloween gradually became more of a commercial event in which department stores found a convenient way to generate lots of pre-Thanksgiving/Christmas season income.
Today, it’s not uncommon for churches to host “Trunk or Treat” events as an alternative for their kids. And there’s actually much more to this story, so click on!
PREVIOUSLY ON HILLFAITH:
WHAT WOULD YOU SAY: Did Christians Steal Jesus’ Resurrection Story from Pagan Myths?
WHAT WOULD YOU SAY: But the Church is Full of Hypocrites
WHAT WOULD YOU SAY: If You Died Tonight and God Asked You …
Should Christians celebrate ramadan? Should Christians celebrate yom kippur? What about diwali? If your answer to any of these is, “No,” then you should not celebrate hallowe’en, whose origins lie in the pagan tradition of samhain. If your answer to any of these is, “Yes,” then you are not a Christian. And don’t give me any of that ecumenical hogwash. Christians should celebrate Christian feasts, festivals and holy days; there are a lot of them, too, so it’s not like you’ll be deprived of celebration time.