Halloween fun?

29/10/09 | Posted by Poppy

It is that time of year again when small children turn up at the front door demanding sweets and chocolate. I will have my door firmly shut on Saturday. Is this because I'm a Christian or just a grumpy old woman?

 Pumpkin Picture with thanks to Maria Li

The grumpy old woman factor is quite prominent. I’m old enough to remember when Halloween meant a special edition of Blue Peter with John Noakes and Peter Purves decorating bat shaped biscuits. If we were really lucky we got a spooky story on Jackanory.

And that was it. No trick or treating, no dressing up and no pumpkins. The current fashion for dressing wee children in shop bought fancy dress and then sending them round to the neighbours for sweeties is an export from the United States. Change….bah humbug.

But underneath all this grumpiness is a disquiet about dressing children up as things that are about ugliness and death. This week I’ve seen mini gouls, decaying mummies, ghosts and vampires on children as young as five.

Years ago one of my sons was invited to a neighbourhood Halloween party at short notice. Not wanting to be party poopers we borrowed a black tee-shirt from his father, put sunglasses on him and put gel in his hair to make him look cool and trendy. Five minutes work and we had a 9 year old vampire in the house. Looking at what we had done I was really unhappy about it but let him go to the party.

I think what upset me was that vampires in popular fiction are cruel and kill. They are predators who use people as food and have no empathy or compassion. In folklore they are evil. In a rash of films, tv shows and books over the past ten years or so vampires have become sexy and aspirational. In ‘Buffy,’ ‘Angel,’ ‘Moonlight’ and ‘Twilight’ the vampires heros are tortured souls who struggle with their inner demons. It is all a long way from Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula and who was based on Vlad the Impaler, a historical figure, who really did like to listen to the screams of his victims as they died in agony.

Maybe I’m over sensitive but there is enough death and destruction and injustice in the world without dressing kids up in a glamorized version of it. This week 80 women and children were killed in a market bomb attack in Pakistan. There was nothing glamorous about that.

My way of dealing with Halloween over the years has been to create a family album of photos of my grandparents and great uncles and aunts. Then on All Hallows Eve I can tell the children the stories of their family. About my grandfather who had to go out to work at 14 because his father was killed on the trams and he had to leave school to support his mother and sisters. We have photos of the wonderful cakes he made and the shop he ran in the forties. We have stories about how the family managed through the blitz in World War II, how a bomb fell on the sofa and didn’t go off and how my uncle was shot down over Germany in the last months of the war. By telling these stories I’m passing on the family history but I’m also introducing the children to the idea of death. All the people in my family book are dead. They left behind people who cared for them and who want to remember them but they are with us no more.

These members of my family weren’t perfect, they made mistakes, but the thought of my loved ones as ghosts or ghouls or vampires makes me really sad. I have a hope that they are with Jesus who said that he was the way the truth and the life. There is no certainty about that hope because it comes from faith. Sometimes that faith is fragile, sometimes it feels stronger but as I look at my family pictures this weekend I will hold onto the the love that I grandfather showed me and see in it that love a pale reflection of the overwhelming love of God for all of mankind. And it seems better to honour my beloved dead to remember them with love than celebrate the ugliness of the undead.

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