Put the "Hallow" Back in Hallowe'en!

Image from Catholic.org

Catholics!  Let's take back Halloween!  Let's make it about holiness again!

Hallowe'en is an archaic name for holy eve.  What is the holy eve it celebrates?  All Saints Day of course!

The fact that the secular world focuses more on Halloween than the reason for Halloween shows just how skewed things have gotten.

How to Be a Better Catholic celebrating the triumvirate holidays of Halloween, All Saints Day and All Souls Day:

Halloween has morphed into a commercial holiday that is based on exploitation in one form or another.  Let's not go along with this!  We can still have fun but keep our priorities straight.

Decorations:
Avoid all the cheap, low grade, plastic tchotchke that is pumped out at a frightening and excessive rate so we can decorate our homes, lawns, classrooms, etc.  A lot this stuff is Made in China under horrific working conditions, creating tons of pollution along the way.   It's an extremely destructive and ultimately meaningless production of junk.  We don't need it to enjoy life and we shouldn't let pressure from corporations and misguided commercial practices take away from our beloved holiday.

What's nice though is at this time of year, nature, at least in the northern hemisphere, provides a lot of natural ways to decorate.  So paint your pumpkins, carve your Jack O' Lanterns, stuff your own scarecrows using straw and old ratty clothes, line your driveway with reusable lanterns or candle holders.  Make your own front door wreath or sign or buy from a local artist.  Go to your local corn maze, bonfire, apple picking event.  Make Halloween and all things Autumnal more about nature than commercial excess.

Costumes
Don't buy chintzy, plastic or polyester costumes for your kids.  Instead have a real dress up box of second hand clothes or items made from natural fibers that the kids can turn into whatever they want.  Or if you are good at sewing, make your own.   For instance, one brown robe can be the basis for many different costumes.  You want various articles of clothing that are versatile and can used to make all sorts of different costumes.  Take your kids second hand shopping to help them make their own costume.  And here is a really important Catholic element that will bring real depth of meaning to your Halloween.  Let the kids dress up as saints! In my own family,  often we would dress up as one thing on Halloween (like a princess or a knight) and then use the same costume the next day for an All Saints party (like St. Elizabeth of Hungary or St. George).  The whole reason for Halloween as I said before, is to prepare for the high holy day (of obligation, btw) of All Saints Day!  Dressing up as saints is extremely on point here!

Dealing with the Spooky Aspect
If you are chary of spooky stuff because it's got a bad vibe to you, due to adults turning folk fun into Satanic or demented sordidness, you don't have to go that way at all.  Just celebrate the autumn and saints.  No judgment here!

If you, like me, rather enjoy spooky stories and old timey ghost stories, fairy tales, etc then have fun with it but be aware that some elements in society have hijacked this into rather nefarious channels.  When my kids were younger, I liked to use this time of year to explore literature that somehow resonated with the autumn months.  To me, it's about discernment.  There is lots of classic stuff to read with your family to deepen your enjoyment.  Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost, The Headless Horseman by Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe poems and short stories, Hamlet and MacBeth are perfect plays to read for this season.  Sherlock Holmes stories, Agatha Christie short stories, G. K. Chesterton Father Brown stories.  And for younger kids, just reading fairy tales is fun.

Candy:
Here's a list of some ideas for a zero waste Halloween.   I don't go along with the one suggestion that you just try to find candy that is still wrapped in cardboard boxes like Milk Duds.  First of all, they are tiny boxes and I don't know if they actually make it into regular paper recycling.  And they might contaminate the recycling anyway because of melted chocolate.  So you can't really recycle them, I don't think.  You could compost though.  However, the other thing that bothers me even more is that Hershey is notorious for buying chocolate from the commodities market where they have a deliberately opaque supply chain that probably involves very bad labor practices.  Why do we want to support a company that has been exploiting developing countries and children to make its vast fortune?  That doesn't feel very saintly to me!  I mean Milk Duds and Junior Mints just aren't that important to me when I think about it that way.

I honestly think we teach kids gluttony when we deluge them with candy.  We do it starting well before Halloween and pretty much continuing it through Christmas.  (With maybe a brief break until Valentine's Day starts it up again).  We are really doing a major disservice to our kids in a very misguided, negligent way by letting the candy producers own our consciences because we ourselves are weak and addicted and don't have good judgment.  Kids are obese and diabetes at younger and younger ages is skyrocketing.  We are literally damaging our children's health and endangering their lives because we have so little self-control.

Let's make this about God instead.  When we put Him first, things always shake out the way they should.  To be zero waste one often has to plan ahead.  Some alternatives for trick or treaters:

•  Equal Exchange chocolate from Catholic Relief Services and give that out.  It's pricey so you won't be tempted to go overboard.  And you'll know that your money went to help the less fortunate.  
• Hand out things like mandarins with jack o lantern faces.  I did this one year and the kids thought it was cute.  
• As in the linked suggestions, come up with another non-candy treat to hand out.

But again, we shouldn't buy candy and chocolate from companies that have murky supply chains which more than likely involve child labor or slavery.  We really shouldn't be celebrating the eve of All Saints by gluttonously gorging on misbegotten gains.

To me, a Catholic consumer wants to be educated and make their shopping choices based on Christian teachings.  Excessive, reckless consumption might be the zeitgeist of living in the USA today, but it doesn't align with what is truly meaningful to me.

Making Holy Eve about Holiness:
As Catholics, why don't we make going to confession and adoration part of the lead up to Halloween?  We are preparing to honor all the saints in heaven and on All Souls' Day we are praying for the dead.  Shouldn't we make the beautiful gifts of the sacraments part and parcel of this preparation?  The sacrament of Confession cleanses us of our sins (at least until we sin again!) and Adoration centers our prayer life in Christ's gift of the Eucharist.  This year, 2019, the Saturday before Halloween is October 26th.  Put it on your calendar to go to confession. Or if you have a parish around you that has weekday confession, go for it.

To be continued . . . .