The War on Halloween

If you think this current “cancel culture” trend is something new, think again. It’s just that with the Internet and social media, we have newer and faster ways of spreading our righteous indignation.

For ever and ever, there have been widespread movements and pushes to tear down the things that offend us — even when those supposed offenses don’t come with a clearly defined reason for being offensive.

I’m not talking about the push to ban things like slavery or denying women the right to vote or things like that…

I’m talking about taking something that really isn’t harming anyone and turning it into a movement in order to… well, the motives aren’t always clear.

Take the Prohibition Movement. I get that alcoholism is a real thing and that it has damaged many lives, but drinking seems like one of those “personal responsibility” things rather than pushing for a Constitutional Amendment to try and rid the country of “the demon drink,” but that’s exactly what happened for a dozen or so years until we collectively decided that was a bad idea.

The same for book banning. Even today, you can find a list of books that have been banned from libraries across the U.S. because of someone’s agenda. We’re not talking about “The Anarchist’s Cookbook” or “Fifty Shades of Grey” or something scandalous. We’re talking “Harry Potter” or “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” or “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”

In other words, just because you don’t like something

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doesn’t mean we need a push to get rid of it.

So, I said all of that to say this… I was in my late teens when I first realized there was a serious effort to snuff out Halloween. By then, I was too old for tricks-or-treats, but I still liked doing Halloween stuff every year. But I was in church one October when I heard someone bring up Halloween and how it promoted evil and the Devil and witchcraft and such.

Now, teenage me was like, “Yeah, and?” but that was the first time I remember even thinking there was anything more to Halloween than costumes and candy.

And it wasn’t just here in Crittenden County (although the West Memphis 3 murders a few years later didn’t help at all in local attitudes). No, the whole country was, on one level or another, caught up in what eventually became known as the “Satanic Panic” and boy did it have an influence on community feelings on Halloween.

Fast-forward a few years and the whole West Memphis Three and Satanic cult thing had happened, and I think that’s when it really took off to bash Halloween, at least around here. Other places had their own resons to launch moral objections to the celebration of the spooky season too.

Yep, all of a sudden, there were no “Halloween” parties. Nope, instead, there were “Harvest” parties and “Fall Festival” gatherings.

The local churches were all over this. What is a Harvest Party or a Fall Festival? If I’m being completely honest (and a little smartallecky), those all sound fare more sinister and pagan and sort of Druit-like than just going trick-ortreating. But I guess that’s the Christian tradition, isn’t it? Jesus wasn’t born on December 25th and wasn’t necessarily resurrected on “Easter” Sunday, but that’s when folks were already celebrating, so they just sort of piggybacked on already estabished holidays.

I’m off on a tangent…

Well, whatever you want to call it, it’s always toward the end of October, pretty close to the 31st, and you put on a costume and you collect candy, play games and have fun! Weird, that sounds an awful lot like Halloween.

Do you sacrifice a goat or commune with evil spirits or hail Satan? No? Oh, then it’s exactly like Halloween because no one does any of those things on Halloween either.

It has really taken off. Now these “Not Halloween” parties are everywhere.

They’ve even added “trunk or treat” to the activities, where you don’t get together with your terrible, nogood, very bad friends and roam the dangerous neighborhood streets at night and risk getting kidnapped and being sacrificed to Baphomet. Nope, you all go to one centralized location (like, say a church) and folks just give you candy right out of their cars and trucks. You know, taking candy from strangers in vehicles, just like we were told over and over as kids was a perfectly safe and normal thing to do…

Now here in 2022, we’ve started seeing a bit of the Halloween spirit return. It never really left. We have some in the community that have insisted, “They can’t stop my kids from trick-or-treatin’… We did it as kids and we turned out just fine!”

So fortunately, there will be little ghosts and goblins and princesses and such out and about this Monday in search of sweet treats. My own plans will just be to maybe order pizza and watch scary movies but if you have kids young enough to be trick-ortreaters (or trunk-ortreaters) turn them loose on the neighborhood!

Oh, and have a Happy Hallowhatever!