I did not have the average Halloween experience of dressing up, trick-or-treating, and making myself sick eating all the candy I collected. Halloween was not a holiday celebrated in my immediate family when I was growing up. My mom has a few pictures in scrapbooks of my cousins and me dressed up like Disney princesses and bright orange pumpkins one Halloween almost two decades ago. It was so long ago I do not recall the event. The pictures are the only such memories I have.
My family's choice not to celebrate Halloween started when I was about five years old. My parents were new believers in God, and the small Baptist church my family attended had hired a new pastor. In the fall of that year, the new pastor explained his views on Halloween to my parents and a few other families in the church. He believed it was a satanic, sinful holiday that should not be celebrated by Christians. He was apparently very persuasive and won my parents over. From then on my younger brother and I were not allowed to dress up and go trick-or-treating on October 31 with our friends.
At first I was a little disappointed and even got angry with my parents. I remember the night my mom told us we would not be trick-or-treating any more.
“This year we are not going to dress up for Halloween,” my mom explained, anxiously anticipating our reaction.
“Why not, Mom?” my brother whined. “Everyone else gets to do it.”
My mom went on to discuss what the pastor had said about Halloween being evil and how we are not like everyone else. She ended her spiel, “We love God and are going to set a good example by not supporting this holiday.”
“That’s just stupid,” I said with my stubborn attitude, and that is how I felt for a while.
I never truly understood why my parents thought Halloween was a bad idea, because I was so young. I just knew that it was something everyone else did, but we did not do, which is a little frustrating for a five year old. But I also knew my family was not the typical family. We did not do a lot of things other families did, like attend high school football games every Friday night or go see movies at the local theater. Instead we went on our own adventures, camping at the lake, shooting guns at the creek, and playing endless card and board games at my grandparents’ house. I enjoyed the things that we did and always felt like it was everyone else who was missing out.
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