[lepton]

Anyone, Christian or pagan, who can confuse the great American costume party on October 31 in which children dress up in mockery of the powers of evil (and just about anything else these days) with a pagan or demonic rite is sorely deluded.

Unfortunately there are a lot of people who *do* take the celebration of Halloween as a serious religious exercise.

[The_Reader_David]

Anyone, Christian or pagan, who can confuse the great American costume party on October 31 in which children dress up in mockery of the powers of evil (and just about anything else these days) with a pagan or demonic rite is sorely deluded.

Unfortunately there are a lot of people who *do* take the celebration of Halloween as a serious religious exercise.

And that is why I included pagans in my list of the deluded. Sure the 'neo-Druidic' Wiccans have created a coincident 'celebration' of a feebly revived Samhain, but that is not our American costume party. The children who beg for candy on the one occasion when mendicancy has social approval in America are no more participating in a Wiccan Samhain than were Christians who first kept the Feast of the Nativity participating in the (already neo-)pagan festival of Sol Invictus because the dates coincided, or Christians celebrating whichever day of Holy Week happens to coincide with Passover are celebrating the Jewish Pesach.