Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 31, 1993 TAG: 9311030072
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Cody Lowe
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Now, however, we're seeing a significant - if yet little-noticed - effort in many denominations to keep youths from participating in the traditional celebration of mischief and sugar-feasting in favor of church-centered activities.
Those churches encourage little ones to dress up as angels and saints, rather than ghosts and goblins, and to be in the fellowship or social hall rather than on the street.
Although a number of localities urged their children to do their trick-or-treating Saturday night, today is really Halloween, and the time for many of those church-sponsored activities.
The day's name comes from a Christian holiday - All Hallow's Eve - the day before the celebration of All Saint's Day.
But most Christians don't pay much attention to either of those days as particularly holy. And there has always been the holiday's links to a pagan past. Halloween fell, coincidentally or not, on what was New Year's Eve in Celtic pagan culture - the festival of Sambain.
Summer's end was observed, huge bonfires were lighted to frighten away evil spirits, dead souls came back to revisit their homes. Ghosts, witches and demons were in particular profusion.
Eventually, Halloween was transformed into a purely secular celebration, with vestiges of earlier pagan and Christian elements. Practically nobody believed the spirits of the dead - good or evil - actually were roaming about that night.
By the late 19th century, the holiday had taken on many of its familiar elements of today - costumes, pranks and trick-or-treating.
The idea of more or less encouraging children - boys, mainly - to destroy or damage other people's personal property has always been frowned upon by the church, but it was never really that big a deal.
The holiday was generally pretty benign throughout most of my own mid-20th-century boyhood.
By the early 1960s the focus of complaints about the holiday shifted from boys breaking school windows or leaving cherry bombs in mailboxes to sinister treat-givers inserting razor blades in apples and pins in candy. Eventually, the threat would be drugs hidden in shiny, sweet packages.
Like the Tylenol cyanide and Pepsi syringe scares of today, fears were exponentially out of proportion to the threat. Parents couldn't help but worry, though.
By 1965, the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) started playing off those fears - and a genuine motivation by people to help others - by encouraging children to collect pennies and nickels as their treats on Halloween night. The money would go to help sick and starving and freezing children around the world.
By then, I was too old for trick-or-treating anyway, so this attempted transfiguration wasn't too painful.
The thing is, I haven't heard too much about it in recent years. Judging by the amount of candy I give out - and the lack of requests for loose change - the campaign didn't have staying power.
Today, more and more Christian churches are worrying again about the elements of witchcraft and demons that persist in Halloween tradition. They are afraid there is a subtle but real lesson that those things are OK for children.
There are new, widespread fears - though little concrete evidence - of satanic ritual cults that abuse children who are either enticed or forced to join. Some popular Christian literature - most of it written as fiction - focuses on unseen spiritual forces of good and evil at war around and within us.
I guess I worry that all this seriousness attached to the holiday by adults will have a more powerful negative impact than the holiday ever has. In modern times, anyway, children haven't bought into the witches-and-devils aspect of the holiday. They just don't believe it.
Acknowledging that there is evil - even a force of evil - in the world doesn't lead to the conclusion that Halloween is the day that evil is unleashed unrestrained. Christian adults who emphasize too strongly the strength of that evil tend to devalue their own faith to their children.
Unless those parents accept the pagan background as valid, the current toothless traditions should carry no fear.
Besides, if the kids don't go out, how will I ever get any candy?
Cody Lowe reports on issues of religion and ethics for this newspaper.
by CNB