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What Some Christians Get Wrong About the History of Halloween
My parents banned Halloween. This is why they didn’t need to
We turned all the lights off in the house and sat in darkened silence when trick-or-treaters came calling. A whole evening of hiding in the dark from eight-year-olds in skeleton costumes.
This was my Halloween experience growing up. In our house, it was considered the most ungodly of all celebrations. The holiday that, according to general Christian lore, celebrates everything evil. Everything pagan.
Everything Christianity stands against.
Yet as I grew up, travelled and saw how other countries celebrated Halloween, it became apparent that my parents were looking at Halloween all wrong.
Then I found out how wrong.
The first thing to know about Halloween is that there is some debate over its roots. Is it based on pagan or Christian traditions?
The general consensus has been for a while that Halloween has its roots in the Celtic festival of Samhain, which celebrated the end of harvest and the onset of winter. A time when the Celts apparently believed that: the veil between the living and the dead was at its thinnest.
