Halloween Scariness

Halloween is one of my least favorite holidays. We spend the entire month before Halloween with Sonshine in our bed. He keeps on "seeing" ghosts and other assorted ghoulies during the night, even though by day he says he's not scared of them.

Although I don't think Halloween is evil or Satanic, I still think it's not a good idea. Every culture needs a holiday to celebrate by dressing up, but I think we could do something more like Purim, which doesn't involve dragging out dead bodies in contradiction to the doctrines of the Gospel we're trying to teach our children. Kids who are too young to know the difference between Real and Imaginary are constantly being confronted with images of death, and the scarier the "better." I should clarify that don't try to shield my kids from the idea of death-- they've had older relatives die, and their father frequently plays piano at funerals-- but these grotesque, unrealistic images of graves, bodies, and ghosts are just over-the-top scary and cause excessive nightmares.

There's just no way to avoid this imagery at Halloween time. We can decorate our house in a harvest theme, but the neighbors can turn their front yard into a scary graveyard visible from the kids' window and we can't have anything to say about it.