The Habit of Celebrating Halloween Year Round
With all the colors changing and the cooler temperatures ushering in winter, fall is my favorite time of year. Yet this season has one component I dislike strongly and that is the celebration of Halloween. The dangerous concept of getting candy from complete strangers, the gruesome costumes that kids wear nowadays, the “Trick or Treat” philosophy, and the dark background of this holiday, make Halloween a day I strongly dislike!
Churches often provide an alternative like “Trunk or Treat” or a “Harvest Festival”, so Christians have somewhere safe to takes their children for Halloween. I’m not so sure this isn’t a form of apathy to all that Halloween represents. However, this year God used Halloween, the costumes, the “Trick or Treat” philosophy, and even the candy to make a spiritual parallel to everyday life that really got me thinking.
Where God is concerned, Halloween represents the spiritual battle we face every day. Satan loves to get us to wear masks with each other for fear of rejection or he has no problem wearing us as a costume, so we fight with flesh and blood (each other) instead of warring against him. He loves to entice us to indulge our flesh with things that are not good for us but pleasing to the eye and to our tastebuds. The “Trick or Treat” philosophy often plays out in our relationships when we exercise the right to retaliate when we don’t get treated the way we think we should. Sadly, our doors are wide open to the dark forces of this world that come into our homes daily via the internet, TV, music or social media, providing entertainment without thought to what it’s doing to our minds and our spirit. And finally, there’s the apathy to sin that has the body of Christ plagued by the same attitudes and behaviors of the world around us. It’s like we’re celebrating Halloween year-round, and we don’t even know it.
Thankfully, there is a light in the midst of darkness that can serve to counteract this dark dilemma, that is Christmas! It has the power to transform our tendency to celebrate Halloween year-round and give us the chance to adopt the Spirit of Christ year-round. For me, this is my HOPE! 
Lord, I pray that as this dark holiday approaches, the You will sensitize us to the spiritual forces around us. And instead of living Halloween year-round, we will choose to live out our faith with a boldness and a conviction so that the world will see in us, the Spirit of Christmas year-round. In the name of Christ Jesus, we pray. Amen!