We Don't Celebrate Halloween. We Celebrate All Saints Day.
We Don't Celebrate Halloween. We Celebrate All Saints Day.
Why do we feel the need to try to accommodate these secular, or even neo-pagan, holidays? We have a rich liturgical tradition full of feasts. Let's celebrate the good stuff instead.
Preface
Let me start this off by saying I neither judge nor condemn any Christians who celebrate Halloween. I personally know multiple devout Christians who do, and they do an excellent job of finding the good in it and enjoying it as a chance to dress up, trick-or-treat, use their imagination, and have fun. Almost like a creative dress up party that just happens to be inconveniently placed on the eve of the Solemnity of All Saints. I appreciate these people, especially how they find the good in all things, and I hope they don’t take this the wrong way.
With that being said, I would like to share why our family chose to drop Halloween altogether and celebrate All Saints (All Hallows) instead, and why I think all Catholics would benefit from doing the same. I’ll also give some examples of how we celebrate. Please share in the comments below if you celebrate All Saints Day, and how you do it!
Why All Saints INSTEAD of Halloween
And Eli′jah came near to all the people, and said,
“How long will you go limping with two different opinions?
If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Ba′al, then follow him.”
And the people did not answer him a word.
— 1 Kings 18:21
My wife and I used to struggle when deciding how much we should compromise with the prevailing culture in the interest of charity and preserving wholesome traditions for our children. Some of our discussions looked something like this: on the one hand, we grew up innocently dressing up and trick-or-treating for Halloween and we turned out fine. On the other hand, it has gotten much more overtly dark and demonic since we were children… But, if we don’t celebrate it are we unnecessarily depriving our kids of a fun experience and ostracizing them? Besides, we can’t live in a vacuum, humans need culture and ritual. If we remove the secular and neo-pagan “holy days” that we were raised with, how will we fill the gap? Not to mention the fact that, we still have our non-Catholic relatives who want to celebrate with us!
A promising, but I think incomplete, move in the right direction is the witness of many families who choose to dress their children as Saints for Halloween. It’s so encouraging to see this! This is an example of trying to “redeem” this holiday by infusing it with the Saints; and why shouldn’t we? It is “All Hallows Eve” after all!
Redeeming cultural traditions, properly understood, is a very good thing. The proper way to redeem something is to take a custom that has elements of truth, goodness, and beauty, and then elevate and perfect it in light of the Gospel, removing the bad and keeping the good. When we come to God, we lose nothing that is true, good, and beautiful.
So why not redeem Halloween in this way? Because Halloween is a regression from something that has already been redeemed. It used to be a Catholic feast, but now it is a corruption and aberration of that feast. If you’ll allow me an imperfect analogy: if you have a cake that has gone bad, you don’t fix it by dressing up the rotten cake with more icing. You fix it by getting a fresh new cake—then go ahead and put as much icing on it as you want. In a similar way, if we were to elevate and redeem Halloween in light of the Gospel we would end up with… All Saints Day! Any attempt to infuse Halloween with more Christian elements, but not replace it entirely, would just be adding icing to the rotten cake. The final, redeemed form of Halloween is the Solemnity of All Hallows.
In light of this, the choice was clear for us: we couldn’t serve two masters. It didn’t make sense for us to celebrate Halloween as usual, but try to redeem it a bit by just dressing as Saints instead of other things. By the way, also has negative practical effects: if you save all of the most fun activities for secular holidays rather than Feasts, which ones do you think your kids will look forward to? Ultimately we had to decide to celebrate All Saints, or celebrate Halloween; celebrate Santa-Claus-Christmas, or Celebrate the Nativity; Serve the Lord, or serve Ba’al. The hardest part is making the commitment to drop the secular holidays. Once we did that, we found so much more freedom and joy in celebrating the Sacred Feasts of our Religion with single mindedness.
Despite our fears, we took the leap to drop Halloween completely in favor of celebrating All Saints Day years ago, and we couldn’t be happier about that decision. If you’re thinking about ditching Halloween to go all in on All Saints, it may seem like a difficult decision—and depending on your temperament it may be more so for you than for others. We are meant to inherit our culture from the time of our childhood and absorb it almost through osmosis, not read about it and implement it as if from an instruction manual. Yet this is the challenge the Lord has given us in His loving providence. Christian culture has been destroyed over the last century, and we inherited a corrupted and broken secular culture in its place. It is our duty to restore Catholic culture in our families and communities as best we can. If we work hard, our children will be able to pick up where we left off.
Here are some of the traditions we do to celebrate All Saints Day, starting with “All Saints Eve” the night before. If you have any traditions, please share in the comments, so that we can all learn from each other and be mutually encouraged by one another’s faith.
All Saint’s Day Traditions:
1. Mass on All Saint’s Eve
The best way to celebrate any Feast is with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Plus, it’s a Holy Day of Obligation, so make sure to go.
We like going the on All Hallows Eve, if you will. It’s the perfect way to fix our minds and hearts on what we are about to celebrate, and to make reparation for the blasphemies and sins that are often committed on October 31st.
2. Post Images of All the Saints on on the Wall
This is my personal favorite tradition. The morning of All Saints we’ll put on music, get some snacks out, and have let the kids take turns putting up the pictures of the Saints on the wall in our prayer space. It’s a lot like decorating the Christmas tree!
We leave them all up there until the start of Advent, which is usually at the end of November. It’s a great way to transition into the season of penance.
3. Pick Saints out of a Hat to Learn About and be Your Patrons for the Year
This is probably the highlight of the whole feast. We put a bunch of Saints names in a box, say a prayer asking for their intercession and that the Holy Spirit would guide our hands so that it is not us who pick them, but they who pick us. Then we each draw a name out of the hat and take that Saint on as a little patron for the year. It’s October 28th as I write this and my kids are already asking me multiple times a day, “When do we get to pick out our Saints?”
I believe the Saints really honor this tradition. One year, when we were doing full-time college ministry, one of our students had been trying to decide on whether or not to enter Med School, and then drew Saint Luke, Patron Saint of Physicians. Another time, Saint Peter had kept coming up, seemingly out of no where, during someone’s prayers for weeks—they ended up drawing Saint Peter!
After picking Saints we have our kids ask for their intercession every day at the end of our morning offering, and that keeps them top of mind and the relationship growing throughout the year. It’s also a good idea to try to read the biography or some writings of the Saint you pick throughout the year.
4. Dress up and play the usual fall games or go to an All Saints Day Party.
It almost goes without saying: do the costumes! Saint costumes are awesome, and kids, of course, love it. The hard part is finding a way to celebrate. Look around at local parishes and homeschool coops—I’m sure that there are options if you look. The picture above is from a Parish in my diocese in California, and it is just one of many All Saints options available this week.
If you can’t find anything, why not be the change you want to see and throw your own party with some like-minded families?
You Will Gain Everything and Lose Nothing
I call heaven and earth to record this day against you,
that I have set before you life and death,
blessing and cursing: therefore choose life…
— Deuteronomy 30:19
If you drop Halloween for All Saints, I think you’ll find that you’ve really lost nothing. Everything good about Halloween can be fulfilled in a real celebration of All Saints, but you can never enjoy the fullness of the All Saints by trying to elevate Halloween.
The other day, my 8 year old daughter asked me as we drove by a skeleton decoration, “Why do people celebrate death?” She saw right through the facade of Halloween for what it really has become: a celebration of death. All Saint’s Day is a Feast that celebrates Eternal Life. Which way will you choose?
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I'm a little late finishing this article, but it was really good! I enjoyed reading about your traditions. They are beautiful!