To Trick or To Treat — King's Students on Halloween
King’s Students’ childhood Halloween photos I Photos courtesy of Becket O'Neil, Olivia Klineau, Ava Van Hala, Matthew Peterson, Aidan Kurth and Lillian Brown.
For the past month, New York buildings have been covered with bones and severed body parts.
Yet, instead of feeling terror and confusion when passing these places, New Yorkers just keep walking without a moment’s hesitation. How did it become normal to decorate with cobwebs, sliced-up gourds and models of dead people?
Why do children annually show up at our homes dressed like a character from a Tim Burton movie, expecting us to hand them plastic-wrapped amalgamations of corn syrup and sugar in order to prevent having our houses desecrated by pranks?
Halloween is a shortened form of the date’s true name “All Hallow’s Eve,” which refers to the night before All Hallow’s Day. With “hallow” meaning holy, it is virtually interchangeable with its more common name: All Saint’s Day.
Halloween began as an ancient Celtic tradition of lighting bonfires and dressing up to ward off and hide from evil spirits on a night in which the dead were said to return to their homes. Years later, in what was likely an attempt to christianize the pagan tradition, All Saints Eve was established on this same day. So, we dress up to prevent evil spirits from identifying us, but we are also commemorating the holy saints of the Catholic Church. However strange this may be, this is what Halloween is celebrating.
Halloween somehow has reputations for both childish whimsy and adult raunchiness. There appear to be as many reasons to love Halloween as reasons to hate it.
Some at King’s are wary of Halloween, considering the associations it has with death and the occult.
Eldaa Ouedraogo, a King’s freshman studying Media, Culture, and The Arts, grew up believing that Halloween was the “devil’s birthday.”
Ouedraogo, who grew up in an African household, was not allowed to celebrate Halloween and continues to abstain from celebrating.
Steven Nassar, a freshman with an undecided major, admitted that he didn’t “understand the whole… backstory with it.”
As someone practicing Judaism, Nassar was not allowed to celebrate Halloween, but said that he “like[s] the vibes.”
Colton Taussig, a freshman studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics who grew up celebrating Halloween, urged that Halloween was not entirely bad but that there were certain elements which Christians ought to abstain from.
“If Halloween for teenagers is scary parties, scary movies [and] acts of delinquency, I do not believe we should be condoning those actions,” Taussig said. “Now if it’s for little kids and they're dressing up as Buzz Lightyear and they’re superheroes and they’re going to get candy, I don’t see what’s so wrong with that.”
Emma Jones, a freshman studying Media, Culture and the Arts, grew up with parents who felt that celebrating Halloween was “celebrating a holiday that didn’t need to exist,” so they instead celebrated Reformation Day, the anniversary of Martin Luther beginning the reformation by posting his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Castle Church.
Others are skeptics. They believe Halloween may have some merit but is not necessarily helpful.
Jordan Story, a freshman studying Business Management, who did not grow up celebrating, felt that Halloween is not “really celebrating anything uplifting, although that doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t be uplifting.”
Brianna Minifie, a freshman studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics, doesn’t think adults “should use their time, their resources [or] their money to celebrate a holiday that isn’t really beneficial and not necessarily Biblical. I just think there are better ways to spend our time and resources.”
But, there are also those with the more culturally-dominant position–some feel that Halloween is, simply, fun.
“I love Halloween, it’s a great time…I don’t see why it’s such a big thing for some Christians,” said Aidan Kurth, a junior studying Media, Culture and The Arts.
According to Olivia B. Waxman at Time, it appears that Halloween is distrusted because it is one of many bits of American culture that contribute to the aestheticizing of evil. Since the 1970s, many Christian parents have been concerned that the rebellion, violence and non-Christian spirituality of phenomenons such as rock and roll, Halloween and Dungeons and Dragons will lead their children down to the pits of Satanism.
This “Satanic Panic” is often mocked by the culture at large, including many Christians. Contrary to historical Satanism, which involved much blatant debauchery, the current Church of Satan does not involve devil worship and is more accurately described as humanism with a creepy name.
For many, Halloween is a celebration of nostalgia. It’s a celebration of memories and emotion — a time when our biggest concern was if our candy bucket was deep enough for a whole block’s worth of treats.
Matthew Peterson is a freshman studying Journalism, Culture and Society at The King’s College. He currently works as the Empire State Tribune’s Podcast Editor.