Comments about ‘How faiths unmask Halloween’

Happy Halloween!

Halloween turned into a retail experience a long time ago...faiths need not explain it anymore than christmas or flag day. True meaning, right or wrong in the eyes of faih, is long gone.

I went to parochial school as a child and I thought Halloween was a Catholic holiday - afterall, we didn't have to go to school the next day.

All holidays are based on some old pagan celebration. For me it is a holiday to just have fun. The only evil in it is in the mind of the beholder.

Jehovah's Witnesses reject all holidays even benign Mother's day,exception being the Lord's evening meal also called the Last Supper or Good Friday.

They believe that when the world ends they are the only one who will survive.

The Watchtower leaders want us to be 'different' for the sake of being different.Jehovah's Witnesses are not 'happier' and are just as dysfunctional as families who do holidays.
Jesus was not born on Dec 25th,but he also did not have his second coming in the month of October 1914,which is the core doctrine of the Watchtower religion.

Santa Claus is a fairy tale and so is Watchtower 1914 dogma.

We many times think about what we think about things. For a change try to see God's point of view, we may take lightly what may offend him. Jesus told us to do the Fathers will not our own.

Wouldn't it be nice if the pictures used for Halloween were not so gruesome? Most families do not celebrate with death heads and glowing eyed monsters. How about a few children, shivering with excitement, decked out in great dress-ups, ready to go visit their neighbors? How about a school party with crepe paper streamers,and pumpkin cups full of apple cider? How about a community display of carved Jack-o-Lanterns?

We keep saying that Halloween is not celebrated as a festival of the dead, but we keep writing and photographing it as if we lived 2,000 years ago. Is that because the group that goes for the gruesome is so small that everything they do makes news?

It is a pagan evil concept and should be avoided.

Doug, don't you think that EVERY holiday has been turned into a retail experience?

I celebrate Halloween. Every year. Not as a pagan holiday or a time to worship the occult.

I celebrate Halloween as a time to dress up in fun costumes. As a time to eat candy. As a time to have fun with family members. As a time to let kids be kids.

I say that a holiday is as evil as you make it--and true, some people really play up the grotesque and morbid about Halloween. The fact that Christmas occurs in late December because the holiday was converted from a winter solstice festival should not deter Christians, nor should the fact that Easter, a celebration of the Resurrection, was originally derived from a pagan celebration of springtime rebirth and tied to fertility rites that were as sexual as they were agricultural.

Halloween can be about the harmless fun of scares and spooks and dressing up, or it can be taken too far and get morbid and perverse. Christmas can be about Christ, or it can be about materialism. Any holiday is what you make of it.

SANTA ISN'T REAL??? I SMITE THEE NON-BELIEVER!!!

By the way, that is an extremely weird photo illustration. Let's have a contest to come up with the title of the movie for which that could be the poster.

I wouldn't let my kids go TorT because I did see it as them being allowed to legally beg for food. Now I learn that it was a tradition in England home of our ancestors.

Also after over 20 years I will be passing out candy this year. I love the neighborhood that I live in and the kids are great.

Halloween is so pagen.. I've already seen kids dressed as Hannah Montana, Strawberry Shortcake, as well as a couple cowboys. Heaven forbid that we would let our children pretend to be something so bad.

Why dress up like dead people for Halloween? You will all die soon enough and then you will resemble your costumes FOR REAL :-\

The turn from simple fun and traditional scary to the horrific, and the adults failing to leave it to children has been what has turned some of us off to participating in recent years. When 5 years olds started showing up on our doorsteps in Freddy Kreuger/Jason masks, bloody-looking weapons and razor finger costumes, our interest sure waned. With that, adults, with teens soon in tow, have taken the dressing up for fun into using the anonymity of wearing a mask as a excuse to act out in and behaving in or portraying vulgar, horrific or extreme roles. That tendency to act out was likely the underlying principle (with 'safety' being the pat reason) to rules discouraging full masks, to which some still adhere.

I am not one for suggesting top-down changes. I would think it would be nice to see more Strawberry Shortcakes, Robin Hoods, clever Campbell's Soup cans, or simple ghosts, with the teens weaning themselves from the children's dress-up fun by around 13. All of that, of course, starts at home.

Children who grow up without fantasy and make-believe will grow up sheltered, unmotivated, and with a lack of creativity. Teach them the difference between fantasy and reality - and let them have some safe fun! Some people need to just get over themselves...

To S2, you are right. I have seen kids dress up like mass murders, chain saw massacre crew and Cannibals with a body part hanging from their mouths. It grouses me out, and for this reason we do not celebrate Halloween any longer. It is a mischievous night.

Some people can always find something to gripe about. It's just a costume party, guys. Get over it!

Ok, for all of you's who hate halloween costumes. My kid is going as a white angel bowing a gold horn.