Conventional wisdom holds that Halloween is essentially a secular and pagan holiday, the result of the Christian Church appropriating an ancient Celtic harvest festival. But one strain of critical opinion tends to the view that the holiday was thoroughly Christian from the start.
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Tomorrow night American kids will observe a tradition not widely celebrated in the rest of the world: Halloween. They will dress up as ghosts, witches, goblins, politicians, and other scary things, then go door to door greeting neighbors with Trick or treat! Residents will drop candy in the bags the children are carrying.
Regardless of anyone’s intention, the tradition nicely demonstrates the creativity of free exchange.
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A United States appellate court has overturned a lower court’s ruling in the case of. a Georgia sheriff.
Butts County Sheriff Gary Long in 2018 hung signs in the yards of the county’s 57 registered sex offenders before Halloween, warning parents not to allow their children to trick-or-treat at those homes.
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Memphis had a violent Halloween weekend, including three homicides, according to the Memphis Police Department (MPD).
Around 10 a.m. Sunday, MPD officers responded to a shooting at the 400 block of Laclede Avenue, where they found two male shooting victims dead inside of a vehicle. MPD officers tweeted that they have not identified any suspects in the killings.
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Conventional wisdom holds that Halloween is essentially a secular and pagan holiday, the result of the Christian Church appropriating an ancient Celtic harvest festival. But one strain of critical opinion tends to the view that the holiday was thoroughly Christian from the start.
In the church calendar, Halloween (All Hallows’ Eve) is the beginning of a triduum of holidays commemorating the dead, continuing with All Saints’ Day on November 1 and All Souls’ Day on November 2. It was common practice among the early Christians to commemorate the deaths of various martyrs at the places of their demise. In the 9th century Pope Gregory IV decided that the time had come for a single universal feast to commemorate all the saints, as well as a day to pray for one’s deceased loved ones. The pope chose a time of year—the end of harvest and the beginning of winter—when many people’s thoughts naturally turned to the idea of death.
The macabre aspects which have grown up around Halloween in modern times—the emphasis on witches, ghosts and other ghoulish figures, the glorification of gore and violence—have led many people to doubt its Christian character and many Christians to shun it. Yet according to some historians, these demonic elements of the holiday originated from a distinctively medieval Christian idea of exorcising evil by ridiculing it. Christian theology holds that Jesus conquered sin and death; and death loses its sting precisely when one is able to laugh at it.
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In East Lansing, Michigan, multiple elementary schools have announced the sudden cancellation of the celebrations of two beloved holidays, Halloween and Valentine’s Day, baselessly claiming that these holidays represent discrimination against some students, as reported by USA Today.
Schools in the East Lansing Public Schools (ELPS) district sent a joint letter to parents, signed by the various principals in the district, declaring that the schools would no longer recognize either holiday. The letter claims that the decision was due to these holidays resulting in some families feeling uncomfortable due to their students being excluded from the celebrations.
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A Seattle elementary school cancelled its Halloween parade citing concerns that the annual event “marginalizes students of color who do not celebrate the holiday,” according to Jason Rantz of radio station 770 KTTH.
Benjamin Franklin Day Elementary (B.F. Day), part of Seattle Public Schools (SPS) also said black males do not celebrate Halloween, Rantz reported on 770 KTTH. The school administration said its decision to cancel involved “foundational beliefs around equity for our students and families.”
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A bill prohibiting Halloween activities and mandating a curfew for registered sex offenders has moved steadily through the State House. The legislation was introduced by Representative Lowell Russell (R-Vonore), a retired member of law enforcement himself.
The bill would align with similar rules previously imposed on offenders by law enforcement around the holiday. Since 2015, Tennessee Department of Corrections (TDOC) has implemented “Operation Blackout,” a coordinated effort to conduct compliance checks on sex offenders that were on probation or parole come Halloween night. The offenders were required to abide by a 12-hour curfew and no-costume policy, as well as keep their porch lights off, doors closed to trick-or-treaters, and homes free of all fall decorations.
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Metro Nashville charged three women for hosting a Halloween party that officials say violated COVID-19 restrictions.
Charged were Madilyn Dennington, Bailey Mills and Olivia Noe, according to a story by WKRN. They are residents at a house on Boscobel Street that allegedly hosted the party; authorities received complaints for a loud party there.
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When I was a kid, Halloween was for kids only. Adults were there to hand out candy — and monitor the kids to make sure we weren’t enjoying the culture of ghosts, ghouls, and goblins too much. That would be dabbling in evil, and our souls might be corrupted. My mom, for example, banned fake blood from the house. At the age of 15 or so, your Halloween fun was expected to be over.
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The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) released guidelines for trick-or-treating on Thursday, going against guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which recommended against the activity entirely.
In addition to standard coronavirus safety guidelines such as mask-wearing and social distancing, the MDHHS also recommended that homeowners passing out candy use duct tape to mark six-foot distances leading from where the candy is, distributing candy on a disinfected table to limit direct contact and handing out candy in an open space. For trick-or-treaters, it suggested participating in one-way trick-or-treating and only going to houses with safety measures in place.
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A group of punks wearing print-out masks of Andy Ngo’s face, appeared outside the Portland-based journalist’s home Halloween night in a scene reminiscent of “The Purge.”
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When I was a kid, Halloween was for kids only. Adults were there to hand out candy — and monitor the kids to make sure we weren’t enjoying the culture of ghosts, ghouls, and goblins too much. That would be dabbling in evil, and our souls might be corrupted. My mom, for example, banned fake blood from the house. At the age of 15 or so, your Halloween fun was expected to be over.
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As we come to the end of summer and begin the season of winter, one hundred and seventy-nine million Americans will celebrate the season with urban legends, scary bonfire stories, and armies of children carrying candy up and down the streets of in what was once referred to as Samhain, All Hallows Eve and All Saints Day in the early Middle Ages and marks itself as a “cross-quarter” day acknowledging the end of the harvesting season and the beginning of winter. Early civilizations were big observers of the sky. A cross-quarter day is a day more or less a midway marker between an equinox (when the sun sets due west) and a solstice (when the sun sets at its most northern or southern point on the horizon). October thirty-first is an approximately middle point between the autumn equinox and winter solstice, for those of us living in the Northern Hemisphere. The United States is home to many haunted farms, abandoned insane asylums, historic mansions now turned museums, and old spirit infested bridges. We’ve found a few that may very well be hidden in your own backyard. Whether you believe in ghosts, goblins, demonic possessions and or spirits, one thing is for…
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In his daily podcast Monday, Al Mohler said something likely to give many Christians a chill down the spine. “It can now be argued that Halloween is the biggest spiritual holiday on the American calendar,” said Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Our culture has been secularizing Christmas and Easter, which are now largely about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, Mohler noted on The Briefing. The opposite has been happening with Halloween, which has become more spiritual as Americans are drawing out and celebrating its pagan origins, he said, describing how this marks a change from a few decades ago, when Halloween was a peripheral holiday mostly for children. Today, with adults also celebrating Halloween, the holiday is second only to Christmas in economic activity. Halloween, Mohler said, “has grown ever more dark.” Historically, Halloween had its beginnings in the European Celtic festival of Samhain at the end of summer as winter beckoned. It was believed that Samhain, the lord of the dead, or the lord of darkness, sent out evil spirits to attack people at this time of year, and that people could escape only by donning disguises to look like evil spirits…
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October 31st marks the ancient tradition of Halloween and the rituals, from dressing up like goblins and ghouls to transforming their homes into haunts. Then there is the tradition of sending the kids out to collect candy from their neighbors. People seldom question such annual rituals; they just do them…
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