Halloween has always been a big part of my life and my favorite time of year. But it has never, not even a little, been related to evil or Satan in my mind.
A bit of history… I grew up in a Halloween-centric family. My parents love dressing up. My grandma even used to like to get into character. We dressed up year round, not just on Halloween. Halloween was just the time of the year we dressed as “scary” things. Witches, skeletons, vampires and the like, if it was scary we loved it. But none of it was evil. None of it was satanic. None of it was celebrating anything other than the fact that it was “the scary time of year” and that other people were okay with us (our family) dressing up and going out in public like that.
In the Arminian church I grew up in there wasn’t much push-back against Halloween but I’ve found in the reformed world it is talked about much, much more. There are more people who are dead-on against celebrating it at all. I’m okay with that. I get that — in fact I forego “scary” costumes anymore because my wife doesn’t like scary things — but is Halloween something I should not do? Am I sinning by celebrating it, loving it, and passing on the traditions to my kids? I don’t think so.
There are plenty of articles out there about this that give far greater examples and scripture and so forth than I will here. There are resources that give you, as someone in Christ, lots of things you can do “for” Halloween that is really “instead of” Halloween; if that’s where you are then praise God! but I don’t even see it as something that needs to be “converted.” There is nothing about it to me that means evil. There is nothing about it that screams Satan. Sure there are lots of evil things that go on during Halloween — probably — but they no more affect how I celebrate it or what’s in my heart than the evil that’s done around Christmas, or June 4th (my birthday) affect celebrating those things.
I believe Satan is far more involved in our self-righteousness and pride than he is in zombies, caricature storybook witches or dressing up like scary things.
