Excuse me for asking, but what’s wrong with you people? Why on earth would you dress up your children like witches, or hobgoblins, ghosts, demons, dead men’s bones and then send out to commit extortion on your neighbors by demanding treats and threatening tricks if the neighbors don’t come across? What could you possibly be thinking and why allow your children to go to the door of a house of a total stranger and accept gifts of candy? I thought we didn’t want our children accepting candy from strangers. And anyway, it’s gotten to the place where you have to take the candy and the apples and stuff down to the hospital to have them x-rayed to be sure there isn’t a razor blade embedded in it somewhere. My, can’t we afford to go out and buy some candy for our kids? Do we have to send them around the neighbor’s house begging for it?
They call it Halloween because it falls on the eve of All Hallows or All Saints Day. This is the day when the church honors all the great Christians of years gone by, people who’ve lived good lives and sometimes sacrificial lives in their service to other Christians and other peoples. Considering that, I’ve got a question. Since this day, All Hallows Eve, is all about people who have lived their lives doing good works, why don’t we dress our kids up in costumes representing these good people and take them out on All Hallows Eve to do good works? Couldn’t that have gone either way? Couldn’t we have made that choice? I mean, do we have to go to dead men’s bones and all that stuff, or couldn’t we have gone out and done good works instead of tricks or treats? Why don’t we put together packages of candy and gifts and take our little angels to a nursing home somewhere and go around giving gifts to the elderly and the infirm? Why don’t we teach our little angels to sing songs for the old codgers that would bring tears to their eyes? Why wouldn’t we have, let’s say, one of these cute little girls crawl up in the lap of an elderly lady and give her a big hug? Do you have any idea what a difference that would make in the life of an old person who hardly ever gets to see her own grandchildren because nobody will bring them in? Why is it that we don’t teach our children how good it feels to do nice things for other people, instead of teaching them greed and extortion? Again, I say, I don’t get it. If we had a choice of doing one or the other, who in the world made the choice of taking it one way instead of the other?
What you are allowing your kids to do by the way, on Halloween, has nothing to do with All Saints. It’s the old Druid New Year Samhain, the night in which the doors of the abyss, the underworld with all their evil spirits, are released out into the world. I was rummaging around on the Internet trying to find something about Halloween and I came across one of these Internet magazines called Samhain, of all things. I found this little item in there and I thought you might find it of interest. It says this…