As I write, with the weather on the turn and summer lapsing away like grief, as Emily Dickinson put it, there are daily consolatory inspections of the potager after school to check on the pumpkin patch. This autumn there are a dozen jolly giant squashes ripening, an increase of about 600 per cent on my first feeble attempts last year, which grew scarcely large enough to decorate a small side table and necessitated a trip to the supermarket in order to carve lanterns.
I had promised the children a Halloween party, as trick-or-treating in our sparsely-populated Norfolk village – where retired couples draw their curtains at 4 p.m. – would be a dispiriting experience. Around 20 children came in fancy dress and played games like apple bobbing and eating a sticky bun suspended from a string with their hands behind their backs. They ate their way through a gruesome menu of “vampire repellent” (garlic bread) with “Frankenstein fingers” (sausages) followed by a pudding of “pus and blood clots” (a strawberry jelly and a lime milk jelly scrambled together), then danced to a Halloween disco and toasted marshmallows over the firepit.
It was all harmless, old-fashioned fun. Only one parent declined, saying, “We don’t celebrate Halloween – for religious reasons.” This surprised me as they are Anglicans; it’s usually Catholics who are against their kids taking part in the one night of the year where they’re allowed to binge on Haribo and run wild.
Even at my sons’ old Catholic primary school in south London, in a liberal parish with many blended families and gay parents, the Halloween party was replaced with a “sparkly disco” – which is a pretty poor substitute, particularly if you’re a boy.
Many Catholics throw seasonal gatherings where children are invited to dress up as a saint. Again, this is not an acceptable alternative for most children. While I’d have loved a night out drinking in Soho with St Augustine before he converted, some of the others seem like crushing bores. And then there’s St Paul and his endless missives – “Oh no, not him again!” as the Eddie Izzard skit goes.
Then there’s the small matter of most saints meeting ends so horrific as to send any child encouraged to emulate them scuttling off to therapy in later life and writing a misery memoir. Which saint would you dress your child as? St Bartholomew? Flayed. St Laurence? Grilled. Or perhaps they could go as St Cassian. He was butchered by children, so other young partygoers could reenact hacking him to death. And what party treats would you serve? Perhaps some Sicilian cassatelle, little dome-shaped cakes with a glacé cherry on top, representing St Agatha’s severed breasts.
“It’s pretty harmless for small children to go to a party or trick-or-treating, because it’s just an excuse for fun,” says one Catholic friend. “But I loathe it when teenagers do it because they’re able to understand what’s being celebrated.” I also loathe opening the door to teenage trick-or-treaters, but for different reasons: when it’s six-foot boys with a hoodie pulled down over their Scream mask, it’s less trick-or-treat and more extortion with menaces.
But the point about what it is they’re celebrating is a good one. I don’t think any child – big or small – is celebrating evil or worshipping the Devil, consciously or unconsciously, by dressing up as a ghoul and procuring sweets from neighbours. It’s about communal fun and excitement – and I am all for extending what has become a short-lived childhood in which screens have replaced lived experience. Letting my daughter dress up as the witch in <em>Room on the Broom </em>is not going to lead to a lifetime of Satanism.
In medieval times, people dressed as ghouls on All Hallow’s Eve as part of the festival of All Saints – celebrated from the ninth century onwards – to show that Christ’s resurrection was stronger than death. Its roots lie in the Gaelic festival of Samhain which, like the Day of the Dead in Mexico, was sanitised and incorporated into the Church. Granted, few children intent on consuming as much refined sugar as possible at the end of the month will be aware of this.
And yet why do so many Christians think that marking Halloween is so wrong? The Vatican website has a total of four references to Halloween, none of them in English and all in passing.
A priest friend pointed me towards a short video by Mgr Mark Crisp of the Archdiocese of Birmingham, who explains that cancelling or ignoring the event is “the wrong approach – because it even accentuates the wrong understanding of Halloween”.
Indeed, pumpkin lanterns, Mgr Crisp continues, show us “that light is stronger than darkness”, and reminds us to go to Mass on 1 November – it is a day of obligation, after all.
If that isn’t enough to convince, might I leave you with my own thought that the rampant commercialisation of Halloween in the UK has at least largely effaced the popularity of Bonfire Night on 5 November. I’ll raise a boob-shaped cupcake to that.
<em>(Photo: Getty Images.)</em>
<strong><strong>This article appears in the October 2024 edition of the <em>Catholic Herald</em>. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural and orthodox Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">HERE</mark></a></strong></strong>.
