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puzzleannie
Guest
the origins of Halloween come from the fact that it is the vigil of the feast of all Saints. Perhaps you are confusing that with various secular and cultural customs in various places that have co-opted the name?
If some of us want to celebrate a day dedicated to accumulating chocolate under all forms, what has that to do with druids? chocolate was not even known in their time. Because chocolate is the gift of the Aztecs should Christians then refuse to eat it?
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ScareBear
Guest
Annie (and I keep meaning to tell you that you’re awesome, BTW!
),There was a show on History Channel as well about American foods the other day. (Yes, I am a nerd!) They briefly detailed how chocolate is made. Impressive and, wow, who discovered that long, tedious process of turning cocoa beans into wonderful goodness?!?!?!
Carry on. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.
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CesarAugustus
Guest
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Mickey
Guest
It is the devil’s feast day!
Be watchful.
Be watchful.
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phillipa31
Guest
It’s a day like any other. Give it more meaning and that’s what it will be for you.
Have fun, eat some candy and enjoy the little kids playing dress up (they don’t *have *to dress up as devils or witches…)
Have fun, eat some candy and enjoy the little kids playing dress up (they don’t *have *to dress up as devils or witches…)
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Lost_Wanderer
Guest
I’ve seen bishops, priests, and religious like this occasionally. Sadly this does not really speak for the whole Church (or even just the Church in our country) but rather highlights the typical ignorance that infests the minds of my fellow Pinoys. Catholics here tend to get caught up with the whole hoohah over subliminal messages and whatnot originating from Protestants here.
sighs
Like Rizal, I long for the day our education system actually cures that.
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CesarAugustus
Guest
Where I live, and in the nearby countries, some Catholics (mostly neocons and average parishioners) are infested with cheap Protestant style apologetics too.
But, my point was the warning about Halloween, and not the “subliminal messages” concerns.
As I said earlier, the objections I (and other people too, like the Priests at my University, and some traditional Catholics) have against halloween, are mainly for these reasons: the samhain connection, the focus on bad disguises and decoration, and secular things taking over religious celebrations, that is, the usurpation of the vespers of All Saints Day.
Blessings!!!
But, my point was the warning about Halloween, and not the “subliminal messages” concerns.
As I said earlier, the objections I (and other people too, like the Priests at my University, and some traditional Catholics) have against halloween, are mainly for these reasons: the samhain connection, the focus on bad disguises and decoration, and secular things taking over religious celebrations, that is, the usurpation of the vespers of All Saints Day.
Blessings!!!
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puzzleannie
Guest
thanks for reminding me, devils food cake is also chocolate, gotta love it
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Lost_Wanderer
Guest
Unfortunately that implies a false dichotomy which in of itself is not a very logical argument.
You say Halloween-Samhain connection, you can’t leave out the Christmas-Winter Solstice connection. To argue against one is to argue against the other.
All Souls/Saints Day is celebrated here by a simple (albeit crowded) trip to the local cemetery in order to pay respects to our dearly departed. Then again, what is so wrong about having some fun in the night before that is Halloween? It’s not that hard to schedule time for both.
If you ask me, All Souls Day is rather depressing when you think about it. Death is not a happy thing. People will always lament and miss those who have died. One thing I like about the culture of Halloween is how it eases up the atmosphere or at least makes it more bearable.
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EasterJoy
Guest
No, no, you have All Soul’s Day all wrong! I like the way C.S. Lewis put it at the end of Screwtape Letters, when the man dies and Screwtape torments Wormwood for having lost his prey to Purgatory:
*You have let a soul slip through your fingers. The howl of sharpened famine for that loss re-echoes at this moment through all the levels of the Kingdom of Noise down to the very Throne itself. It makes me mad to think of it. How well I know what happened at the instant when they snatched him from you! There was a sudden clearing of his eyes (was there not?) as he saw you for the first time, and recognized the part you had had in him and knew that you had it no longer. Just think (and let it be the beginning of your agony) what he felt at that moment; as if a scab had fallen from an old sore, as if he were emerging from a hideous, shell-like tetter, as if he shuffled off for good and all a defiled, wet, clinging garment. By Hell, it is misery enough to see them in their mortal days taking off dirtied and uncomfortable clothes and splashing in hot water and giving little grunts of pleasure—stretching their eased limbs. What, then, of this final stripping, this complete cleansing?
The more one thinks about it, the worse it becomes. He got through so easily! No gradual misgivings, no doctor’s sentence, no nursing home, no operating theatre, no false hopes of life; sheer, instantaneous liberation. One moment it seemed to be all our world; the scream of bombs, the fall of houses, the stink and taste of high explosive on the lips and in the lungs, the feet burning with weariness, the heart cold with horrors, the brain reeling, the legs aching; next moment all this was gone, gone like a bad dream, never again to be of any account. Defeated, out-maneuvered fool! Did you mark how naturally—as if he’d been born for it—the earthborn vermin entered the new life? How all his doubts became, in the twinkling of an eye, ridiculous? I know what the creature was saying to itself! “Yes. Of course. It always was like this. All horrors have followed the same course, getting worse and worse and forcing you into a kind of bottle-neck till, at the very moment when you thought you must be crushed, behold! you were out of the narrows and all was suddenly well. The extraction hurt more and more and then the tooth was out. The dream became a nightmare and then you woke. You die and die and then you are beyond death. How could I ever have doubted it?”
As he saw you, he also saw Them. I know how it was. You reeled back dizzy and blinded, more hurt by them than he had ever been by bombs. The degradation of it!—that this thing of earth and slime could stand upright and converse with spirits before whom you, a spirit, could only cower. Perhaps you had hoped that the awe and strangeness of it would dash his joy. But that is the cursed thing; the gods are strange to mortal eyes, and yet they are not strange. He had no faintest conception till that very hour of how they would look, and even doubted their existence. But when he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realized what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone, so that now he could say to them, one by one, not “Who are you?” but “So it was you all the time”. All that they were and said at this meeting woke memories. The dim consciousness of friends about him which had haunted his solitudes from infancy was now at last explained; that central music in every pure experience which had always just evaded memory was now at last recovered. Recognition made him free of their company almost before the limbs of his corpse became quiet. Only you were left outside.
He saw not only Them; he saw Him. This animal, this thing begotten in a bed, could look on Him. What is blinding, suffocating fire to you, is now cool light to him, is clarity itself, and wears the form of a Man. You would like, if you could, to interpret the patient’s prostration in the Presence, his self-abhorrence and utter knowledge of his sins (yes, Wormwood, a clearer knowledge even than yours) on the analogy of your own choking and paralyzing sensations when you encounter the deadly air that breathes from the heart of Heaven. But it’s all nonsense. Pains he may still have to encounter, but they embrace those pains. They would not barter them for any earthly pleasure. All the delights of sense, or heart, or intellect, with which you could once have tempted him, even the delights of virtue itself, now seem to him in comparison but as the half nauseous attractions of a raddled harlot would seem to a man who hears that his true beloved whom he has loved all his life and whom he had believed to be dead is alive and even now at his door. He is caught up into that world where pain and pleasure take on transfinite values and all our arithmetic is dismayed. Once more, the inexplicable meets us.*
Don’t you see, Lost Wanderer? To be in Purgatory, even with its trials and the difficulties of its cleansing, is to be beyond the grasp of temptation, to be beyond the grasp of evil!**We will not always lament! **The Day will come when the tears will be wiped away and the lamentations will be over, and the Church will be as unspotted and lovely as a bride! Death has been defeated!
If that were not so, Halloween would be no more than whistling past the graveyard. As it is, Halloween is spitting in Death’s eye. That is what it is all about.
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Lost_Wanderer
Guest
You’re badly confusing the feelings when meditating on one’s OWN death versus the feelings of people who had to watch the people they love die. It is not WE I am concerned about. It’s the feelings of OTHERS left behind.
Please do not tell me the whole ‘in a better place’ speech is going to change the fact that the mother will never see the son she lost in a car accident or a girl will never give goodnight kisses to the father who died of cancer. People can move on and triumph over the pain of that absence but that absence, that physical absence will always be there.
Death is not evil. It is part of world. It just is. Everyone has a guarantee when it comes to their own mortality.
The spooky stuff of Halloween makes the topic change its demeanor to something that is more emotionally digestible. The frightening ghost stories give people a more mysterious image of Death while stuff like trick-or-treating is even festive.
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EasterJoy
Guest
We are “the others”, here at our house. In the last two years, we’ve buried a grandmother who lived in the same house with us since before our middle-school-aged children were born, a friend not yet 50 who had just reconciled with his family, and a sister-in-law who was the energy of our family, not even 60, just months before her only daughter had her own first child, and another close relative, the center of her husband’s life, who died instantly of a heart attack. Those are just some of them, and yes, these are deaths that make you feel like a three-legged dog, no matter what you do. You cannot help but feel the emptiness when someone dies who had given your life fullness.
When I say “We will not always lament!”, though, I don’t mean we won’t always lament our own deaths. Not at all. I mean that we live with the pain of separation knowing that the separation is temporary. I will tell you: I have heard from funeral directors that the grief of believers and the grief of non-believers are very different things. If you really do believe in that better place, if you really do believe that Christ has defeated death, it makes all of the difference in the world, right here and now.
I’m not arguing against Halloween…although let’s face it, trick-or-treating is the left-over vestige of blackmail by would-be petty vandals, not something that makes death “emotionally digestible”. It’s now a way for adults to con kids into cute costumes while the kids can think they’re conning the adults out of some chocolate and red vines…and an excuse for adults to get into get-ups that are fun but would be too ridiculous to be seen in at any other time of the year.
We live in a society that makes grief harder because it doesn’t want to face death in any real way, but only in “emotionally digestible” (which is to say “emotionally distanced”) ways. Children aren’t taken to funerals, because they are not deemed to be “emotionally ready.” I’ve been going to the funerals of both family and fellow parishioners my entire life. I think that it makes the rituals surrounding death more familiar, and therefore more comforting.
I would argue that when you celebrate Halloween within a community that comes together for every death, where everyone buries the grieving family in homemade casseroles and keeps asking how things are going for months and years later, with many parishioners in professions where death or serious injury was a daily danger, death has a different meaning. It is something we face together, and something we know we have beaten. Combine that with the fact that community believes that the devil is a real adversary who wants to use fear of his temporal ability to terrify as a weapon against us when Our Lord has let us know that we have only sin to fear, and I think that is the best backdrop for Halloween.
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Aelred_Minor
Guest
On the subject of Trick-or-Treating, I thought the practice (though not the phrase) derived not from petty vandels but from the Medieval giving out of “soul cakes” to children as encouragement to them to pray for the dead.
In parts of Scotland apparently kids till perform a “trick” (sing a song, for example) for adults to “earn” their treat. Somehow in America the whole thing got garbled in a rather unpleasent way.
In parts of Scotland apparently kids till perform a “trick” (sing a song, for example) for adults to “earn” their treat. Somehow in America the whole thing got garbled in a rather unpleasent way.
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Catholic90
Guest
I have also heard this. In fact, when we buried my husband, the funeral director was amazed at how composed we all were - if one has faith, then there is nothing to fear! Missing and loneliness? Sure! But not despair and fear!
I contrast that with the death of a teen in our community a few years ago where the family was atheist. The despair, the hopelessness they exhibited - very sad.
If one has faith, then death is just a part of life - passing onto the next.
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Lost_Wanderer
Guest
How is it unpleasant? Mind you, I find costumes in of themselves already a good ‘trick’.
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ExLibris
Guest
I think Catholics should encourage children to dress up as their favorite saint or historical hero (in a respectful way of course).
Just don’t fall into the neo-paganism that is all around.
I hear church festivals are becoming the norm and trick-or-treating is becoming less popular anyway.
Just don’t fall into the neo-paganism that is all around.
I hear church festivals are becoming the norm and trick-or-treating is becoming less popular anyway.
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CesarAugustus
Guest
Christmas is celebrated the 25th of December, because is 9 months after the Annunciation, according to Luke 1:26. -]Is a coincidence that winter solstice was celebrated in the same day./-]
EDIT:* Actually, it seems that winter solstice was celebrated in december 21.*
And, halloween isn’t part of the Liturgical year, while Christmas is.
Where I live people barely knows about All Saints Day, they only know about halloween.
Also, the focus of Christmas is not pagan, comparing the two, isn’t right.
Blessings!
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Aelred_Minor
Guest
I mean the literal meaning of the phrase “trick or treat”: give us a treat or we will play a trick on you (t.p. or egg your house, etc.) Mind you the vast majority of trick-or-treaters have no such intentions; they’re just saying what their parents told them to say, who in turn did the same thing as children. It’s the generation or two (or maybe three now, I forget that I’m getting old) after that when you start getting into the immediate origins of the practice.How is it unpleasant? Mind you, I find costumes in of themselves already a good ‘trick’.
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Aelred_Minor
Guest
Christmas is celebrated December 25 because when the Feast of the Nativity was instituted on that day Christians already believed that was when Jesus was born. Where they got that idea is open to debate.Christmas is celebrated the 25th of December, because is 9 months after the Annunciation, according to Luke 1:26. Is a coincidence that winter solstice was celebrated in the same day.
And, halloween isn’t part of the Liturgical year, while Christmas is.
Where I live people barely knows about All Saints Day, they only know about halloween.
Also, the focus of Christmas is not pagan, comparing the two, isn’t right.
Blessings!
December 25 is not the winter solstice, that’s December 21 or 22.
All Saints Day is of course on the liturgical calendar and we do today have vigil masses on the eve of a particular day, so All Saints Day Eve would be October 31, and this of course is the meaning of the word “Halloween” (still occasionally written “Hallowe’en”, better reflecting the etymology).
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