Holiday Hysteria (a Christian defense of Halloween)

Today is Halloween — and, as you may have noticed, many of our Evangelical friends now shun America’s October spook festival altogether. They tell their children that Halloween is “the devil’s holiday” and that trick-or-treating is little better than dabbling with a Ouija board or consulting an astrologer.

Though such extremism might seem odd or funny to many of us, it’s really, in one sense, quite admirable. If I thought Halloween was what they think it is, I’d keep my kids away from it, too — no matter how odd it might seem to others. But I’m afraid that if our separated brethren don’t stop for a moment and listen to some good old-fashioned Catholic wisdom on this subject, they’ll all be forced to become Jehovah’s Witnesses before long. And that, I think you’ll agree, would be terrible. Let’s try to spare them that fate, at least.

Basically Halloween is our local manifestation of one of mankind’s oldest and most basic impulses: the impulse to contemplate — and even to celebrate — the idea of death during the fall of the year.

After all, the natural world itself dies in the autumn, and that death (along with our sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection for it next spring) has always set human beings to contemplating their own impending date with mortality. The pre-Christian world was positively overflowing with these local death festivals. Whether it was the turning of the leaves along the Danube or the first frost on the haystacks of Burgundy, the pagans who lived in Europe before the coming of Christianity found something driving them to tell ghost stories around the end of October, to dress in creepy costumes, and to build bonfires against a new (and not entirely unpleasant) chill in the air. In some places, dances were held to drive away evil spirits; in others, it was believed that the shades of departed loved ones might take a holiday from Hades on this particular night, and could turn up at your doorstep for a spooky reunion.

Before too long however, Catholic missionaries went to Europe from the East and preached the Gospel of Jesus to these cheery, superstitious heathens. Their fiery crusades against pagan idolatry are the stuff of legend: they inspired their converts to chop down the sacred groves, to smash their idols, and to turn instead to the worship of the one true God, Who created heaven and earth. But these missionaries had another quality as well, an attribute that’s often glossed over in hostile secular accounts. That attribute was empathy.

These early missionaries actually liked the people they were converting. They liked their folkways, and their culture. They liked their music, their dances, and even their local death festivals — or liked, at any rate, everything about them that could be liked without compromising the faith. Interestingly enough, we know from history that Pope Gregory sent his missionaries out with explicit instructions that anything in the local culture which was not actually incompatible with Christianity was to be left strictly alone. Today, we call this approach “missionary inculturation,” and most of us have realized that it isn’t really necessary for a Bantu tribesman to put on a three-piece suit before we allow him to come to church. We may feel very enlightened when we take this approach today, but the truth is that the whole evangelization of Western Europe (325-1100 AD) was accomplished under this principle.

This is the real reason why many Christian holy days correspond to older festivals from the pre-existing pagan calendar. The Europeans, for example, had many cherished family traditions surrounding their winter solstice festivals, and so the Church allowed them to incorporate many of these customs (Christmas trees, etc.) into her nativity celebrations. Likewise, Easter was already a spring holy day for the pagans, devoted to the contemplation of rebirth, new life, and resurrection. It was only natural, then, that many of these ancient customs found themselves gaining new and deeper significance under the reign of Christ, the true God of springtime and fertility.

The pagan death festivals were superceded in just this way by two Christian holy days based on a similar theme — All Saints Day (November 1) and All Souls Day (November 2). The pagans found it natural to remember their departed loved ones at this time of the year, and the Church wisely allowed them to maintain continuity with the old ways. To say, however, that the Church merely “Christianized” the existing paganism is to miss the point badly. As St. Paul dramatically points out in his Epistle to the Romans, paganism already had a good deal of inchoate truth in it already. What the Church actually did was to gather up some of these inchoate truths, sift out what was patently unusable, and then point the pagans to the final fulfillment of their ancient longings as revealed in the faith of Christ.

And yet Halloween isn’t quite All Saints Day, is it? Or All Souls Day. What is it then?

You might say that Halloween is an “echo-holiday.” Halloween is to All Saints & All Souls Days as Mardi Gras is to Ash Wednesday — sort of their outlaw second cousin. Halloween is that part of the ancient death festivals which couldn’t quite be comfortably domesticated. It’s the part that still wants to run wild on the autumn winds, to soap windows and overturn outhouses. And yes, like Mardi Gras, this urge is difficult decently to restrain at times; the sowing of wild oats often produces crops that have to be reaped by the whirlwind. But just because a thing is subject to abuse doesn’t mean the thing itself is evil — a principle that our Evangelical friends have sometimes forgotten when the subject was wine, and we ourselves have often needed to be reminded of when the subject was sex.

Yet it isn’t the puritanical aspect of Evangelicalism that causes me to worry about a possible descent towards the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It’s the knee-jerk response that Halloween is to be feared solely because it has “pagan origins.” The truth is that a good deal of what all of us do every day has pagan origins. The mathematics we use has pagan origins; our form of government has pagan origins; the very letters with which this sentence is written have pagan origins. In fact, most of the churches from which these anti-paganism sermons issue are, architecturally speaking, Greek revival temples in the “neo-classical style.” So “pagan origins” alone isn’t quite enough to damn Halloween all by itself. As a matter of fact, it’s one of the great glories of Christianity that it does save and redeem and baptize pagan things — ourselves included!

Jehovah’s Witnesses, on the other hand, profess to despise everything associated with our pre-Christian past. They especially despise the practices of the Catholic Church that redeem various elements of that pre-Christian past. They teach their disciples to hate and fear all holy days and holidays alike, and will have nothing to do with either Christmas or Easter for precisely the same reasons that Evangelicals are now despising Halloween.

And this is the reason I have found it worthwhile to mount, from time to time, a Christian defense of Halloween. Because one day — perhaps not too long from now — my own friends and relatives are going to feel forced, by their own careless presuppositions, to drop the other shoe on all holidays, to spend December without Christmas, and springtime without Easter, to go to a ballgame and refuse to sing the National Anthem.

If you find, as I do, that such a prospect makes your skin crawl a little, I hope you’ll join me tonight in soaping a few windows or turning over an outhouse or two. For truth’s sake.

You’re right, of course, and I freely admit that. And perhaps it’s that I’m a Catholic and thus more aware of the crap that’s thrown in our direction, but it seems like it flows more from their side to ours than the other way around.

Charity requires me to at least consider the sincerity and love of Christ in everyone who calls himself a Christian. I just wish others would offer the same courtesy, regardless of church membership.

Fair enough.

I am an Evangelical believer and I have the greatest respect for the Catholic Church and devoted Catholics. I see them as brothers and sisters in Christ and, therefore, family. I also see it as possibly the greatest source of good in human history. I thank God for the Catholic Church.

I came to this point of view gradually (long story, if you are interested I'll freepmail the details).

Anyway, it hurts me as a Christian to read the kind of fratricidal stuff that is so often posted here by both sides. We are not enemies. We have a common enemy.

St. Valentine's Day, All Hallow's Eve and Christmas are not derived from or based on pagan holidays.

That is a myth promoted by atheist anthropologists.

Lupercalia may have coincidentally fallen on the Ides of February in the Roman calendar, but Christians do not hold naked races and whip each other with goatskin thongs on St. Valentine's Day.

Samhain technically would have fallen on October 21st not 31st, and was celebrated by feasting, sport and lighting bonfires. In other words, Homecoming Day bears a much closer resemblance in timing and in activity to Samhain than traditional Christian Hallowe'en practices.

Saturnalia was traditionally celebrated on the winter equinox, or December 21st - not December 25th - and was characterized not principally by feasting but by gambling and role-playing. If any modern holiday resembles Saturnalia it is Boxing Day, and that is likely by design.

The Sol Invictus reference is completely anacnronistic. We know that the Church in North Africa observed the Nativity on December 25th as early as 225, and we also know that the feast of Sol Invictus was a novelty introduced to the Roman world by Aurelian in 274. The only previous sun-god feast in Rome began in 222 - but that was the summer solstice feast of Heliogabalus.

The Church had its own calendar from the beginning, based on Sunday worship and on dating yearly events from the feasts of the Resurrection and Pentecost - in other words, the Church year is derivative of Shabbat, Pesach and Shavuos and not from pagan feasts.

To this day, almost every Sunday of the Church year is counted either in terms of its proximity to Pentecost or the Resurrection.

That's not really accurate. You worded your response in a way that implies that the traditional churches calendar is somehow based on God's calendar in the bible. That's not really true.

Look under this heading for computus

This is the way that the modern church computes Easter.

They've been using this method since 1582 (not since the beginning). Here is how they say Easter is computed:

"Easter Sunday is the Sunday following the Paschal Full Moon date."

Sounds good, doesn't it? Paschal = Passover...right? Not quite.

"The Paschal Full Moon date is the Ecclesiastical Full Moon date following 20 March and can be found in this table":

Whoops. So it has nothing to do with the Passover of THE BIBLE. It has to do with a computation agreed upon by men.

To find this date, you take the current year and divide it by 19. You then take the remainder and use the chart to determine the date.

For example, 2008 (this year) divided by 19 = 105 with a remainder of 13. The 13 remainder corresponds to the 22nd of March on the chart.

So you say? So it has nothing to do with the Passover of God, the Paschal of the Lord.

The bible is clear on when Passover is:

Lev 23:5 On the fourteenth day of the first month at twilight is the LORD's Passover.

This corresponds to Nisan 14 on the Hebrew calendar which in 2008 fell on April 19. That's nearly a whole month of difference.

The notion that the modern church is basing it's calendar on God's calendar in scripture is a tough one to believe when you actually look at the date calculations.

Here's the bottom line: God. Jesus Christ. The Lord. Told us what holy days to observe. Jesus Christ created them. They are his. He actually took the time to have them written down and preserved in scripture.

Lev 23:2 Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, Concerning the feasts of the LORD, which ye shall proclaim to be holy convocations, even these are my feasts.

He, the Lord, Christ who became Jesus, then lists his holy days. His feasts.

Christians, for the most part, have turned their back on these holy days of Christ and have instituted their own calendar, their own feast days, and have incorporated the customs and trappings of pagan days into these observances.

And I like Jewish Holidays! Get me back to Fairlawn to Lou and Hy's for the end of Rosh Hashana and a nice knish. I'll be one happy woman.

I know. I wasn't meaning to imply otherwise. But there's a point at issue which Philo-Junius seesm to understand very well, but which I have found a very difficult point to make with most Catholics.

The Hebrew Bible sets up a whole table of holidays. According to the Catholic Church, these were then abolished. Then the Church turned to paganism to come up with a whole table of holidays of its own. (And for Philo-Junius, consider that Jewish chr*stians were forced to abandon Jewish holidays and begin celebrating pagan-originated ones--a situation that exists to this day, and to which the alternative is still considered "Judaizing").

Catholics seem to have trouble understanding the notion of Biblical sentimentalism--that either all holidays and rituals were abolished (as no longer necessary) or else the Biblical rituals and holidays still retained their "mojo."

Catholicism (and all the other ancient liturgical churches) simply don't seem to understand that from the philo-Semitic Fundamentalist Protestant POV they are arguing against themselves. If J*sus made tefillin and Pesach superfluous, then he must have also made rosary beads and chr*stmas superfluous. But if "faith without works is dead," then it is precisely the "works" of the Bible (Biblial rituals and holidays) that should be most meritorious.

Catholicism seems to preach Protestantism to the Jews and Judaism to the Protestants. Does anyone understand this?

Thank you for that very thoughtful response, though I disagree with your assertion that chr*stian holidays are not based on older pagan ones.

As for the winter solstice, that date (and the dates of the other seasons) have drifted due to a flaw in the Julian Calendar. When the Julian Calendar was first instituted, the vernal equinox fell on 3/25. By 325 (the year of the First Nicene Council), it had moved up to 3/21. And by the time of the Gregorian Reform in 1582 it had moved up to 3/11 (which is why ten days were removed from the calendar that year). The vernal equinox currently falls on 3/8 of the Julian Calendar, which is why that calendar is thirteen days behind. Thus, the winter solstice could very well have been on 12/25 when the Julian Calendar was first adopted.

Your post distorts the facts.

(1) Jews and Christians both employ a computus to determine the date of Passover and of Easter, respectively.

(2) The Jews and Christians both adopted their computi at some point during the 300s AD.

(3) Before the adoption of computi, the combination lunar/solar calendars of both Judaism and Christianity were based on personal observation of the lunar cycle and ad hoc methods of calculating intercalary months.

(4) There is no reason whatever that Christians should consider the same computus used by the Jews as the "true" computus. It was formulated by Jewish scholars long after the Apostolic age.

(5) The latest version of the Christian computus may date from the Gregorian reform, but it follows the same principles as the Church used for more than a millenium, the only difference being the degree of consistency that the Gregorian reform introduced.

(6) The Jewish computus underwent modification since the original computus - the current Jewish computus is the one prescribed by Maimonides in his Mishneh Torah from 1178, and even this computus was slightly modified by the Shulchan Aruch of Yosef Karo from the 1520s.

The notion, which your post was attempting to insinuate, that the Jewish calculation of Passover used today is a pure formula unchanged since the days of Moses and David is a fiction.

The parallel notion, that the computus used by the Church for calculating the Feast of the Resurrection is a corrupt and recent formulation, is also a fiction.

(7) The Apostolic Church of the fourth century, not the rabbinate of the fourth century, possessed the authority to calculate the day of the Feast of the Resurrection for its flock.

Then the Church turned to paganism to come up with a whole table of holidays of its own.

A ridiculous claim.

There are basically fourteen great and ancient feasts of the Latin Church, categorized under the old system of feast days as "Doubles of the First Class" or the holiest days of the year.

There are more than fourteen, but a number of them are quite recent, such as the feast of the Kingship of Jesus Christ which is less than 100 years old.

Of the twelve ancient feasts, five are moveables: the Resurrection, the Ascension, Pentecost, Corpus Christi, and the Blood of Christ.

All of them are timed in conjunction with the Jewish Passover.

Then there are the feasts of the Dormition of Mary, of St. John the Baptist, of St. Joseph, of Peter And Paul, of All Saints and of Michael the Archangel.

Of these six, St. Michael falls a week after the autumnal equinox and All Saints falls a week after the Celtic festival of Samhain.

The remaining feasts are Christmas, the Circumcision and Epiphany.

Epiphany and Circumcision are timed specifically to Christmas and Christimas falls several days after the winter solstice or Saturnalia.

So, out of fourteen feasts, three fall on days which are roughly the same time as some pagan festival or other.

In the case of All Saints, the celebrations associated with Samhain are completely different from the cultural practices associated with All Saints. Moreover, the feast dates from the specific dedication of a church of All Saints in Rome in the 600s - it had no relation with Celtic festivals.

The feast of St. Michael a week after the autumnal equinox coincides with no European pagan holiday of any kind. There is a Persian holiday on the autumnal equinox, but it's difficult to see any influence.

The supposed relationship of Christmas and Saturnalia is one I've already gone over.

Of all the major Christian feasts, not one can be credibly linked to pagan festivals.

The fact that you have to scrape up extremely minor holidays like St. Valentine's Day, which was never a major feast, is instructive.

The Christian calendar is based on two sources: (1) Passover and (2) historical events in the Christian Church - like the beheading of John the Baptist, the crucifixions of Peter and Paul, etc.

Honestly, all in all, it doesn’t mean a thing to me if people danced in the woods or sacrificed children on the same days as Catholics celebrate Holy Days.

This is where intent comes in. I have statues in my church but I don’t pray to statues. Personally, I don’t care if others think I do. My intent is not to do that.

And if one of my Feast Days falls on a made up Wiccan holiday or a pagan holiday, who cares? It’s not about them.

Christ came to replace all the silly worship of pond scum and such. So He did.

The Christian calendar is based on two sources: (1) Passover and (2) historical events in the Christian Church - like the beheading of John the Baptist, the crucifixions of Peter and Paul, etc.

The events commemorated by the latter feasts are not observed on the actual anniversaries (since these are not known) but ultimately on a didactic use made of the yearly cycle. Eg, no one believes that J*sus was actually born on 12/25. This time of year was chosen, if not as an inculturation of earlier pagan holidays, because of the didactic value of celebrating light coming into the world on the darkest night of the year. The Jewish holidays, on the other hand, occur on the actual anniversaries of the events commemorated.

As to the computation of the Jewish calendar, it is true that the current method of using a fixed calendar dates back to Hillel II and that prior to that time the new moon was determined by two witnesses, in the following manner: On the thirtieth day of each month if two witnesses testified to the Beit Din that they had seen the new moon, then that day was declared the first day of the new month. If no such witnesses appeared the following day automatically became the first day of the new month. (Note that the new moon sacrifices were offered on the morning of the thirtieth since there was always the possibility that it would be the new moon. When it was not they were offered again the next morning.)

The actual molad (instant of the "birth" of the moon) was actually known beforehand based on mathematical principals. However, this was not used; the witnesses were used instead. So the molad itself (the method for finding which is encoded in the opening passage of the Torah) is not the product of recent computations. With some modifications, this it what is used today (modifications were required to prevent Yom Kippur from falling on the day before or after Shabbat or Hosha`-na' Rabba' from falling on Shabbat; this means the new year cannot begin on the first, fourth, or sixth day of the week).

But more important than all this is that the lunisolar Jewish calendar dates literally back to the creation of the world. The Greco-Roman church merely adapted the pagan Roman solar calendar (other churches, such as the Coptic, Ethiopian, and Syrian churches, use different calendars).

It doesn’t matter what secular or catholic history says about landmarkism. It doesn’t matter what Trail of Blood says. Jesus said He’d preserve His church and the catholic “church” is not it. So there had to be some church working and planting new churches throughout the ages. It wasn’t a Presbyterian, Methodist, or Lutheran. Those started in the reformation.

Landmarkism didn’t start by historical scholarship, it was started by people reading the Bible.

No amount of popish thuggery could destroy the true churches. Not through murder and torture and not through scholarly manipulation.

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