How and why I celebrate Halloween as a Christian
Halloween is a retelling of the story of Jesus, once we remember how to tell stories.
Before last year, I approached Halloween with a mixture of indifference (“it’s just more commercialism”), excitement (“it’s fun with the kids”) and hesitation (“I’m a Christian, is this right? Does it matter?”).
Last year, I read an excellent article by Krish Kandiah (Why I’ve Changed My Mind on Halloween, my thoughts here very much build on top of his) — and since I’ve taken a new approach to Halloween, which embraces both the secular, and the deeper, older, and Christian festival of All Hallows’ Eve (Halloween).
And it’s great.
Let me explain.
There are two Halloweens
C.S. Lewis wrote a letter about ‘The Two Christmases’, in which he separated the Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus from the festival of presents, Christmas trees and parties.
All modern festivals are a bit like Lewis’ Christmases, there’s the Easter of the death and resurrection of Jesus; the secular, materialistic festival of chocolate; and maybe the even older Easter of Ēostre, the goddess of the new dawn.
Halloween too is dissected. Obviously, the supermarkets are keen for us to embrace the festival of dressing up, parties, spooky snacks and trick-or-treating exponentially each year. I don’t think this is the side that particularly bothers christians I know. It’s the underside: the world of witches, zombies, and demons, that urges the christian to abstain; and the christian parent to fear.
I don’t actually think it matters too much what we do with the ‘surface’ Halloween — it’d be naive to assume everybody around is somehow ‘celebrating’ dark things, when in reality they’re having parties and affirming friendship.
But what actually is that other, traditional Halloween?
All Hallows’ Eve
The word Halloween stands for ‘All Hallows’ Eve’, as the evening before the Catholic and Anglican ‘All Hallows’ (or All Saints) Day on November 1st. All Saints Day is a day to celebrate martyrs and ‘saints’ in the Catholic sense (as determined by the Pope), and is immediately followed on November 2nd by “All Souls’ Day”. All Souls’ Day is a day of remembrance for ‘All Souls Faithfully Departed’. A day of celebration that death is not the end.
What a story we have here! Combined with Halloween, the All Saints / Souls Days give us, the Gospel: the story of Jesus’ victory over evil, and over death itself. But is it ok to dress up as a demon? Yes! We just need to understand how story works.
Festivals as dramatic stories
This view of Halloween as ‘All Hallows’ Eve’, combined with All Souls’ Day, reminded me of my time in Barcelona in 2015. I went during La Mercè festival, and got to experience the incredible Catalan spectacle of a correfoc.
In the correfoc, a group of people dress as devils and light fireworks fixed on devil’s pitchforks. Dancing to the sound of a rhythmic drum group, they set off their fireworks among crowds of spectators. (They literally aim them at the crowd!)
It really was a sight to behold!
But here’s the narrative; in most of these Catalan festivals (you can see similar events with devils in festivals in Valencia, and I’m sure elsewhere), the devils come out and do their thing, and then they are gone.
It’s a symbolic gesture of evil trying, and ultimately failing.
If you just take the snapshot, it’s people dressed as, perhaps celebrating, devils. But you have to zoom out and let the story play itself out.
We do this with other Christian festivals all the time — we only call Good Friday good because (spoiler alert!) we know the resurrection is coming on the Sunday.
All of our other Christian festivals have a narrative that we play out:
Easter with Palm Sunday, Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday.
Christmas with Advent. A couple of years ago I followed an amazing live tweet nativity through advent, tweeting from Joseph, Mary and others as if in ‘real time’ through the story of the nativity — bringing the meaning to life through story.
The Dramatic story of Halloween
So what then is our dramatic story of Halloween?
It is nothing less than a cosmic-level retelling of Easter.
Whereas Easter tells us of the historical and physical events around Jesus’ death and resurrection, Halloween gives us the opportunity to re-enact the cosmic-level victory Jesus wins over darkness. It lets us peep behind the curtain into the spiritual realm of Easter, as if to see ‘this is what was going on behind-the-scenes’.
We find this later retelling all through the New Testament. Halloween gives the Apostle Paul a few lines to add to the play.
On All Hallows’ Eve, darkness gathers, Death celebrates a victory, but on All Hallows’ Day, we celebrate that Jesus won and Death lost; whilst remember those we know who have passed away.
The story is right there for us in the New Testament:
Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour…
He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in the cross…
None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
Let us then act out the mocking jeer of demons, zombies and devils on Halloween, knowing that we are in fact mocking them, declaring triumphantly the next morning:
“O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”
An Opportunity
The church has a fantastic opportunity here. One to say “Yes, this, but there’s so much more. You haven’t heard the end of the story!”
I’d love to see the church embrace this narrative retelling of the story of Jesus’ victory at Halloween, on a corporate level. Not just with ‘light festivals’ that replace and hide from the darkness of Halloween, but with the full story intact, the gathering of the darkness, and the permanent, eternal victory of the night.
Symbolism
It may seem childish, to re-enact a play in which Jesus wins a victory over the Scooby-Doo characters and pound shop witches we all dress up as. But it’s symbolism.
Jesus doesn’t literally defeat whatever zombie thing I dressed up as here, but I know Jesus won the victory over Death, and decay, and destruction, and this zombie is a pretty nice representation of those things (if I say so myself (£2 in Asda))
A final word on fear.
This has been a brief overview of how and why I celebrate Halloween, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons for christians to abstain: anti-materialism, conscience, other traditions. The one reason I would hope you wouldn’t abstain though is for fear. If the cosmic-level story of Jesus’ victory over darkness says anything, it says “perfect love casts out all fear”, and reminds us that “He that is in you is greater than he that is in the world”.
We don’t need to hide, with blackout blinds in pumpkinless houses, nor do we need to swap the story out all-together for different secular images of super heroes (which are all violent), and princesses (which all have body image problems). Let us keep the darkness, but celebrate the light that comes after all the more loudly.
in all […] things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.