I’m not a Halloween grinch. But I am close. Its a stupid holiday, really. In a nutshell – parents spend oodles of time, money, or some combo thereof on costumes only to run around and collect candy you could buy at half price the very next day.
While scampering from house to house you are treated to wholesome neighborhood decorations such as lifelike baby dolls hanging from nooses and pass zombies from The Walking Dead. In Minnesota we have the added bonus of freezing our hind ends off in the process. Then, when the actual night is over, you have to deal with your children’s incessant badgering with the candy requests. Yup. Halloween is the gift that keeps ooooooooon giving.
For the life of me I can’t understand why a holiday that promotes evil (the gory, violent kind) coupled with evil (sugar, the substance parents are constantly trying to keep away from their kids) has risen to number two in popularity among US citizens. Evidently candy and gore now officially trump the celebration of a risen Savior. God help us.
To be fair, Halloween and I got off to a rough start. One of my first memories of trick-or-treating is my brother heroically swiping an apple out of my hand and chucking it into the woods before I had a chance to drop it in the candy bag. He gravely informed me that the guy who was handing out apples probably put a razor blade in it. I have never looked at Halloween (or apples) the same way since.
Every year there are news reports of someone discovering drug-laced candy. But no one should get too worried about that now that we know sugar is every bit as addictive as cocaine. Why not double down on the high?
I celebrated Halloween as a kid by donning the same costume of a blow-up googly-eyed cartoonish monster year after year. Sometimes I’d mix it up by tossing a sheet over my head and go out as a ghost. We munched on bat-shaped cookies and made toilet paper ghosts in school. Sometimes someone put on a witches hat or plastic vampire teeth. That was as scary as it got back then. Nowadays its become a game of sport to outdo the neighbor’s kid in the gore department.
In my book, a holiday purportedly for the kids and celebrated “just in good fun” doesn’t need to be so increasingly glorifying of evil. I get it that people who exercise creativity with sensational decor or costumes are not raising little axe murderers and are just having fun. Really, I do. But its not fun for little kids to be scared half to death by images typically reserved for R rated movies. Plus, in a day and age where we bemoan the rise of violence and decline in morals among our youth, it seems strange that we collectively devote an entire day to the worship of both.
