A few days ago, while I was out running errands, I saw a house (in a fairly nice neighborhood) with seasonal (read that: Halloween themed) "decorations" in their yard.
... Okay, before I even get going with this post, I have to hit "pause" & state for the record that the word "decorations" feels wrong when what I saw was a means of glorifying death & very macabre ...
As a mom of five now adult children who homeschooled for 25 years, every now and again I get a bit reflective and do a "rear-view mirror cross-examination" of things we did in our family that I would do differently if given the chance. One of those things is the way we "celebrated" Halloween.
We did all the things. Went to the pumpkin patch, did the corn mazes, carved the pumpkins, decorated the house with "creepy" things, let the kids pick (or design and create) their costumes, attended harvest parties, church events (and hosted a lot of church events when my husband and I led a youth group for over a decade), went door-to-door and/or to trunk-or-treat events on the 31st of October. I feel like we did it all for the entirety of their childhood years...and I honestly do not for the life of me know why I didn't question my mindless participation in the whole doggone thing.
Sure, there were things that were off limits for us. The super demonic type of stuff, the horror movies (huge absolute no for us on those), the clearly dark side with a heavy emphasis on the evil and the Satanic...all of those were never part of our family life. But there were things that niggled at me, and I let them slide. Or maybe I pushed the niggling feeling aside, more than let them slide. I don't think my concerns would have dissipated had I not been their primary "dissipator", if you know what I mean.
And there were plenty of things that did not sit well with me, but I simply had to ignore in order to let my kids participate in all the Halloween stuff. Things like headstones and skeletons. As someone who experienced tragic, sudden, unexpected and somewhat horrific losses of close family members in my teens, I was never comfortable with headstones used as "decorations". Corpses don't tend to spark joy for people who've suffered traumatic loss in their formative years. Headstones have never represented "fun" to me; rather, a headstone represents the space in a cemetery where I first felt overwhelmingly uncertain of how to move forward, unable to reconcile the fact that the world kept spinning, people kept doing all their normal daily stuff, and I did not know how to deal with leaving my loved one buried in the cold ground when the funeral was over. Headstones mark the place where death lies, literally. For lots of people, many of them children, the headstone is a stark and painful reminder of loved ones that will never again speak to you, hug you, come to Thanksgiving dinner, be part of your wedding day...
My father died in a horrific way when I was fifteen. Almost exactly one year earlier, I lost a family member who had not even reached the preschool years. I was extremely close to this little one who died in a car accident on an icy winter road, and this event changed me permanently. I clearly remember the me "before" and the me "after". When my dad died 11 1/2 months later, I changed again. The Bible refers to us as the clay and God as the Potter, and in Jeremiah 18:4 uses the phrase, "And He made it again another..." in describing the way God is in charge of making His vessels what He wants them to be. On the flip side of this beautiful remaking that God does, I experienced a remaking at age 14 and then at 15 which was dark and ugly and hardened parts of me that have never again fully softened. Grief and loss do that, don't they? So why do we fail to consider this come October, when the stuff we put in our front lawns is on full display for every child to see when they step outside? And why didn't I opt out of this icky holiday when I was raising my own children?
I guess I just got stuck going with the flow and didn't want to deal with the things that bothered me about the holiday. So, I kept it as "clean" and un-demonic as I could while allowing my children to have some fun. But it isn't just fun, and you can't clean up Satan's grime. And is it possible to even really keep your own family safe from the evil aspects of Halloween while simultaneously participating in other aspects of it?
I'm sharing all of this here on my blog because I hope it will encourage you to make the hard right decisions for your own family rather than going with the flow like I did for so many years. And I also hope it will land in front of someone who has never considered that tombstones and skeletons represent the worst moment of their lives for so many children and adults. We can't not see this stuff; it's all over, and every time we get in our car to run errands, we see it. Some of us have had enough death in our lives, and we don't ever want to see it celebrated again.
I think this has become a much more controversial subject in the last five or ten years because the next generation of Christian parents, and specifically Christian homeschoolers as it relates to this blog, have come out much more boldly and vocally in opposition to the dark side of Halloween. I agree with them. I applaud them. I am thankful they are speaking out. And I am sorry Gen X parents did not do better by our own children.
Halloween matters for Christians, and I am not going to encourage you to go down a rabbit hole and look into everything that takes places on the 31st, and all throughout the month of October. But I will encourage you to pray about this, asking the Lord to lead your family in the way He wants you to go. Ask Him, listen for His answer, and then simply do what He tells you. It might make you "controversial" to other people in your neighborhood, but when we follow Jesus, we are controversial people anyway, so I suppose this is just one more way that we are standing out, letting our light shine before men, living in this world but not being of it.
And if you happen to know a child who has lost a loved one, would you pray for them this month? Ask God to keep them from seeing things that remind them of their loss and to comfort them as they grieve. Your prayers make a difference!
As always, Lord bless you and happy homeschooling!
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