A harvest festival celebrates reaping crops as the fruits of one’s labor. It is connected to the reality of life as a cycle of birth, death, & renewal. Nothing morbid about that.
Yes, by mocking symbols of death like ghosts & graveyards we lose our fear of those things. But since Halloween is followed by All Saints’ Day, it is by its nature an unholy bacchanal or witches’ sabbath of those damned souls unhonored by the holy festival of the following day.
The Church recognized this & created November 2nd as All Souls’ Day for those not believed to be saints.
Yes, kids running door to door collecting candy is harmless or at least it used to be. Nowadays, kids trick-or-treating need adult protection; things are not as safe for children as they once were.
Food for thought: our town paper today published curfews for Halloween. Those fifteen & under must be off the streets by 11:00 p.m. Those up to age 17 must be indoors by 1:00 a.m. I’ll bet the chief of police is having drama with the mayor over those ungodly hours. She’s up for reelection next week, BTW.
Not being stick-in-the-mud; go forth & have a great time, folks! I’ll still leave my front porch lights off.
That's just a function of "helicopter parenting". It's very safe for the kids to go out on Halloween collecting candy. Probably safer than it was years ago.
How hypocritical of you to say that! Wheat and corn, standing tall in the warm sun, their green and amber stalks waving gently to and fro in the light breeze, and...hark! There is the discordant sound of evil human machinery, smoking and clanking, causing innocent birds and insects to flee in terror in every direction.
As the sound gets louder, the shadow of this "reaping" machine overshadows the innocent plants like a cold hand of death, which for these harmless, innocent living things, it is.
Then, in a swift motion, their existence is painfully blotted out by having their tops and bottoms severed, or having their their nurturing roots, their very hearts, ripped brutally from their womb of the ground.
Only a heartless human-centric, selfish person would think that a harvest festival is harmless.
Upon re-reading my post, it really doesn't sound much different than the Halloween is evil crowd.