Hey Christians, the Halloween America loves has a disturbing past

 

It’s easy to take Halloween for granted. At first blush, it seems like harmless children’s fun. 

What’s more, about 70% of Americans cumulatively spend billions of dollars to participate each year. The candies, decorations, and costumes are almost impossible to avoid. 

But the light-hearted, kid-friendly, materialistic Halloween we know today is the result of centuries of sanitization and re-branding. It has a disturbing history of pagan and occult ritual and widespread, socially-acceptable vandalism that Christians ought to take seriously. 

Its oldest roots are pagan, tracing back to a festival called “Samhain,” when the Druidic priests of ancient Celts thought the dead roamed the earth. They burned animal sacrifices, attempted divination, and wore costumes made of animal hides and skulls. For Wiccans, Halloween is still celebrated in this spirit. 

The Catholic Church tried to replace the pagan festival with “All Souls Day,” which eventually became “Halloween.” That’s why much of the contemporary Halloween celebration is a mixture of religious traditions, folk European harvest-time traditions that muddled and adapted Samhain over time, and modern consumeristic branding.

In the late 1800s, American communities first began pressing people to move away from ghosts and witches in favor of more innocuous, child-centered celebrations. Leaders urged the removal of “frightening” and “grotesque” imagery. They succeeded, for a while; but the occult merely took a back seat to vandalism and anarchy. 

This new, disruptive form of Halloween was largely imported by Scottish and Irish immigrant children, who drew on adapted versions of the original Halloween myths and cultural origin. As time passed, the pranks became more violent: They blew up bombs, threw bricks through windows, and vandalized the property of people who refused them the sweets they begged for.

 

This is an article from the Christian web magazine Christian Post. You can read the full article at https://www.christianpost.com/voices/hey-christians-halloween-has-a-disturbing-past.html

 

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