We don’t mean to scare the bejeezus out of you, but if you love Halloween, you are a heretic.
That’s right. If you’re going out to a costume party dressed up as Leatherface wielding a fake chainsaw, you’re practicing heresy. If your kids are going out trick-or-treating Monday night, dressed as vampires and goblins, your kids are practicing heresy. If you love handing out candy, and making the kids sing for their treats, you indeed are partaking in the gothic underworld that is Halloween.
There are people out there, including letter writers to this paper, who believe Halloween is bad for kids — and they’re not talking about kids consuming copious amounts of gummy worms. They purport that Halloween is a twisted, evil and frightening event that warps the impressionable minds of children. After all, what good could possibly come from allowing your child to dress up as Dracula, complete with fake blood dribbling down his chin?
There’s even a movement afoot in parts of the Western world to eradicate the evils of Halloween and replace it with religion. And, it has a catchy name: Jesus Ween. Instead of handing out candy, Jesus Ween dictates that people hand out child-friendly Bibles or other Christian gifts. Of course, demonic costumes are an absolute no-no.
Believe it or not, there are teachers who won’t allow kids to wear scary Halloween costumes to school. They’d rather the kids wear neutral costumes (a.k.a. no ghoulish getups) and they use Halloween as an opportunity to teach kids about community values.
With rhetoric like this, perhaps we really are regressing to the Middle Ages, where so-called witches were hunted down and burned at the stake.
It’s unfortunate that some people cannot accept Halloween for what it is — a day for kids to let their imaginations go, and, of course, fill their bags with candy. Most well-adjusted adults will recall Halloween with fondness. How much fun was it going to school wearing a bed sheet with two eye holes cut in it, yelling “boo” as you snuck up behind your friends? Or meeting up with your friends in the school gymnasium (along with the rest of the kids) for an afternoon of watching Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein? Then, that night, going to all of your neighbours’ homes, pillowcase in hand, collecting all kinds of treats that you would guard from your sister or brother (and especially your parents), like a mountain of gold, until you ate every last piece of chocolate?
Why can’t we just let kids be kids? Halloween is just days away and all week there’s been this debate among people arguing about whether the day is good or bad for kids. This is an extension of the move to eradicate Christmas from schools – and our lives – because celebrating an occasion we grew up with offends some people. Well, almost everything we do today offends somebody, usually for either an obscure or religious reason.
Those are the same people who insist youngsters seeing ghosts and goblins, graves and monsters, artificial blood and guts will somewhat give them nightmares for a lifetime; that somehow being frightened (usually while being accompanied by a parent) will distort their impressionable minds forever.
To quote Tim Allen on his newest TV show, Last Man Standing: Halloween is perfect for a two-year-old, his brain is too soft to absorb anything. Or, another of his gems: any two-year-old who can demand candy from a man with a chainsaw can beat anything in life.
So give it a rest, people.
There will always be do-gooders out there who think they know what’s best for the rest of us heathens. What they fail to understand is that kids must be allowed to be kids. They have vivid imaginations and tremendous amounts of energy, and Halloween is a day that feeds off both. Take it away and replace it with a boring school lecture on community values and a pillowcase full of child-friendly Bibles … now, that’s scary.
