Where Halloween Isn't

The ghosts and ghouls will be out this evening in towns across America. Kids will be free to beg for treats while threatening tricks all evening from New York to California. But in some places Halloween is done. It was rescheduled!

Here where I live, on the very tip of the Bible Belt, Halloween can't occur on a Sunday or a Wednesday lest the event somehow offend the church goers on those days. The inherent pagan-ness of the holiday is too abhorent to share with a Wednesday and so, here, in Huntington WV, we celebrate Halloween on the closest convenient day which, this year, was the day before Halloween.

We don't reschedule other holidays for fear they might offend one of the less represented religions and we shouldn't but I'm not really convinced there is a reason to reschedule Halloween either. Sure, Halloween has it's roots in old Pagan holidays but, surprise surprise, so too do the most revered Christian holidays of Christmas and Easter. Sure, the Christian faithful managed to successfully hijack both of those religions to fit into their mass marketing machine of eternal forgiveness while the left Halloween in the dust-bin; but I wonder how many of those offended with sharing the day with Halloween even know the history of Easter and Christmas.

Easter was once called Eostre and was a nordic holiday. It also lines up pretty nicely with the spring equinox which, as you might guess, was a hugely popular pagan holiday back before it was appropriated by marauding Christian evangelicals and assorted missionaries. Yet, somehow, if Easter falls on the same sunday as the Spring Equinox we don't reschedule Easter or the Equinox. Obviously we can't reschedule an Equinox and, so it seems, we can't reschedule Easter either.

The pagan ties to Christmas are many and varied and, of all holiday's, Christmas most clearly shows the marketing savvy of the Catholic church back in the day. Amazingly, no real effort has ever been made by Christians to fix the date of Christmas to the actual birth date of Christ. If sharing a church day with Halloween is so difficult for some to swallow why isn't celebrating Christmas on Mithras's birthday an even more bitter pill?

We dressed up in our costumes last night and my daughters and the rest of the neighborhood children brought some joy to a collection of houses throughout the town last night. Those who won't participate in Halloween, for whatever reason, just keep their porch light off and their front door closed. It has no real effect on them but the kids, both in age and at heart, had a bit of fun pretending. I doubt the kids in the families that oppose Halloween happening on a Wednesday are were out trick-or-treating last night so why was it rescheduled? No matter what day it is on those that oppose the holiday don't have to celebrate it.

The Pagan ties to Halloween have been lost in mainstream American culture and the holiday now just represents an opportunity to have a little fun. I'm just not sure why it couldn't happen today when the rest of the country is getting in on the act; but either way my family, and many others, took advantage of the holiday and had a bit of fun.

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