Well, colored vestments didn’t come in quite right at the beginning. Up until the 4th century, white was it. I think they let St. John Chrystostom write a few prayers around that time. So change comes every 500 or 1000 years, whether it is needed or not.
But, to the original question: How much time did St. Nikolai spend in Ireland in the early 700s?
Costumes of skeletons will have meant different things in different places and times. It is entirely possible that everyone St. Nikolai ever saw dressed up as a skeleton was in fact doing it to mock the Church’s veneration of relics. He lived in times and in places where the Orthodox Church was subject to public attack. Skeletons can be innocent symbols, but that does not mean that skeletons cannot also be anti-religious symbols!
As illustration of this, the meaning of the skeletons employed for the Mexican Dia de los Muertos is entirely different from the skeletons used in typical American Halloween decorations. The Dia de losMuertos is not at all scary or spooky. Conversely, most Americans who put a skeleton up couldn’t tell you what a first degree relic
is. If you told them they were mocking holy relics, they’d think you had lost your mind, because they would have meant no such thing. In America, part of Halloween is a confrontation with our fear of death, our fear of the dark, and our fear of people who dress in odd ways. (And wow, can America use that, because so much of the culture is* totally freaked out* when it comes to confronting death!!)
The experience of St. Nikolai, or indeed possibly of someone living in modern-day Serbia, for all I know, might have been different from either of these. In that place, dressing up like a skeleton might have been a favorite way to mock the Orthodox and their beliefs. Of course he would have taken it that way, even if others around him in the US thought it was “innocent”. He knew what it meant to him, and it would have been wrong to force him to go against it. If that what it means to you, it would be wrong to tell you to “lighten up” and go against that.
Perhaps I am biased, but I am much more sympathetic with the Eastern resistance to Halloween than the resistance that has more Puritan reasoning behind it. To avoid a festival because something specific about it to you has a meaning repugnant to the faith is one thing. To ask someone to go against that would be to ask them to go against conscience. For instance, you wouldn’t ask an American to burn their flag in the street, even if burning a country’s flag in the street was an act of reverence in your country. You could only require someone to act in such a way if it were a moral obligation that couldn’t be excused.
To be against all sensual expressions of faith–smells, colors, candlelight, the use of noble metals, and so on–that is just not in keeping with the understanding common to Christians for most of the history of Christendom. That is a reasoning I am far less inclined to allow as universal. That’s my bias, I guess.
