My wife always turns Halloween into a four day event when she can. She scours the paper looking for any trick or treating opportunity. She doesn’t care if it’s a fall festival, a Hallellujah Night, a Trunk or Treat, or Halloween, she spends the bulk of October brainstorming costumes for her* and the boys (during one particularly excessive year, she had a different set of THEMED! costumes for each night).
I’m not a huge fan of Halloween, probably for three reasons: 1) early childhood trauma; 2) I love to defy expectations and horror writers are expected to automatically love it; 3) every year I get embroiled in some argument tenuously framed as “the Church vs. Halloween.” So it’s not a season I look forward to.
This is that time of the year when I’m bombarded with a lot of silly. When Twilight and the Harry Potter books are condemned as evil and occult (of all the very real reasons to not read Twilight, it being “evil” isn’t one of them). When people’s faith is questioned if they watch horror movies. Last year I wrote a blog in response to some folks declaring all fall festivals somehow sinful. I appreciate their concerns because we all struggle with how to apply various passages in the Bible, in this case the biblical injunction not to engage in witchcraft or commune with the spirits of the dead (Deut. 18: 10–13), though we ought to be … cautious in applying Old Testament laws. However, one may want to get to know some actual witches before you go pronouncing that fantasy is somehow the gateway drug to witchcraft. I’m pretty sure that’s not the way it works.
Hallelujah Nights, the Christian alternative to Halloween, tend to set my teeth on edge. I suppose they shouldn’t. As Lisa Morton points out, “the Christian influence on Halloween actually begins in 601 A.D., when Pope Gregory I instructed his missionaries that, rather than obliterate native peoples’ customs and beliefs, they should try to use them; hence, Catholic holy days were set at the times of native holy days, celebrations and festivals. As Christian missionaries moved into Ireland, they practiced Gregory’s doctrine of “syncretism” and replaced the Celts’ Samhain with All Saints’ Day (Pope Gregory III moved the observation to November 1 in the eight century).” It’s not like we didn’t co-opt Yule/Christmas.
And in the end, syncretism or not, all kids care about is dressing up and getting free candy.
So I’ll suck it up and head out to Hallelujah Night** or Trunk or Treat or whatever it is that’s passing out free candy, having bounce houses, has a petting zoo, and … wait, that doesn’t sound too bad. What was I griping about again? (If I were being dragged to a “Hell House” okay then I’d be in full rant mode)
*Okay, here’s the thing: my wife really wanted to be a gumball machine this year. She had to move the coin slot/candy dispenser she was so proud of having hand crafted because of my observation that her placement of it would give a whole new meaning to the phrase “coinbox”.
**That being said, I could use some costume ideas for the next time I’m invited to a church’s Hallelujah Night. I’m thinking me and my wife could come as pre-Fall Adam and Eve, or I could be drunk Noah, or the guy who had a tent peg rammed through his head.
I love the costume ideas – all of them!
Especially “pre-Fall Adam and Eve”! 
I’ve actually seen that done on a Mystery Play broadcast on UK TV: and the way it was done, wasn’t total nudity (!) but wearing some kind of translucent body stocking… 
Your wife Sally certainly seems to have a spirit of seasonal fun – more than you! All I can say is I wish I had that sort of social life – or money I could spend on entertaining! You’re all luckier than you think! (Think of what the poor New Yorkers got for Halloween!)
Anyway. This may be a little late on the draw, but the Celtic Samhain is said to last about a week.. I don’t know when you and Sally were counting your fall week from – but tomorrow night across all UK is Bonfire Night (or Guy Fawkes’, as your V for Vendetta should have told you!) & I believe that’s actually the conclusion of the whole festival.
They’ve already been letting off fireworks for two nights where I am! You chaps only get those on 4th July, don’t you?!
Anyway. What with all the..
..cultural confusion and negative misconceptions about Halloween, especially among today’s Christians, I thought I’d take the opportunity to post a couple of links from a *very* sensible, scholarly and respectable Neopagan site, (it’s that one I’ve recommended to you before: only I don’t know if you got round to taking a look at it) .. It’s written by that redoubtable Isaac Bonewits guy, the late Neopagan writer and ArchDruid of ADF. There’s two essays on there: one debunks myths *about* Halloween:
http://www.neopagan.net/Halloween-Lies.html
; the other is about the real origins of Halloween, mostly as a festival of the British Isles, but a general European thing:
http://www.neopagan.net/Halloween-Origins.html
And THIS one (!) actually tells all interested parties about what it is that a lot of Neopagans *do* actually believe – in common, so it’s all quite general: http://www.neopagan.net/NeopagansBelieve
Good site, that!
(Now d’ya want me to put up the link to the hilarious Chick tract?!
)
I don’t honestly know why some Christians make such a big deal about Halloween/Samhain! I’d quite like to go to a Hell House show for fun though! Like a gothic pantomime!
Richard Dawkins says it’ll scar kids for life though! It might – if you believed it!! 
The true Pagan doctrine of the afterlife is, I have worked out, reincarnation. (Whatever the legends about underworlds and so on – they’re just the recycling plant!
But this I shall have to explain to Maurice privately, at a later date.)
neah: above should be: http://www.neopagan.net/NeopagansBelieve.html, sorry!