The war on Halloween

For years, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and their merry band of outrage whores have lambasted anyone they judged to be insufficiently reverential to the biblical importance of late December and thereby offending all of Christendom or some such nonsense. These nuts fly off the handle at the most trivial, insignificant bullshit. There are no anti-Christian mobs burning down Christmas tree lots, disrupting Midnight Mass, or otherwise mucking about with your Christmas spirit. If there were, OK then. But if you fly into a fit of rage when a cheerful, hardworking sales clerk greets you with “Happy Holidays” when you prefer the more Christian and therefore more correct “Merry Christmas”, well then you need some anger management classes and two scoopfuls of perspective. The Defenders of Christmas point to these imagined slights as evidence of a conspiracy to kill God one holiday at a time. The truth is that the war on Christmas is a contrivance within the tender egos of crazies like O’Reilly. It exists because they perceive it to exist, if only as a misconception of their own victimhood.

Equally ridiculous is the war on Halloween. The same fundamentalists who believe every Nativity scene is sacred, even the really gaudy porcelain crap from the Franklin Mint, are fighting to extinguish the jack-o’-lantern’s candle. As with the war on Christmas, silliness is in great supply and fools abound. Witness the master theologians of The Church of Greenville at Standing Springs. Please, do not be hoodwinked by the amateurish design or simplistic graphics of this website, these folks are serious. You see, through what must have been an exhaustive period of research, peer review, and who am I kidding, the master theologians of The Church of Greenville at Standing Springs have determined that celebrating Halloween is Devil worship and offer twenty-two scripturally supported points against that wicked practice. Here are but a few of these cogent and thoroughly constructed arguments:

2. November 1, the first day of the Celtic year, was a feast day to Samhain, lord of the dead, by the Druids. But the Christian God is the God of the living (Mark 12:27)!

10. The worshippers of God are to come out of Roman Catholicism by special warning from heaven (Rev 18:4), and Halloween is obviously a Roman Catholic holiday.

17. Halloween is popular with the world, which is evidence that it is an abomination to God (Luke 16:15). Friendship with the world makes God your enemy (Jas 4:4).

20. Christians do not threaten “trick or treat” to anyone for any reason, so parents should not endorse such profanity (Gal 5:14; Eph 4:31-32; I Thes 5:15; Jas 2:8), and neither do Christians deceive others with masks, even for a joke (Pr 26:18-19; Rom 13:13).

We have Druids, the damn Catholics (twice I might add and way too common for an original conspiracy theory) what with their false God and all, the foreigners like it so it must be evil, capped off with some semantic idiocy and that crap about masks (And somehow the Jews make it out unscathed. How often does that happen?). There are people who believe that the Druids, Catholics, and foreigners are foisting Halloween on your family so that you too will begin to worship the Dark Lord. This is some wild, black helicopter, tin-foil hat wearing shit and there are lots of people who believe it.

To me, that is the scariest thing about Halloween. Boo.