During the month of October, Americans celebrate the arrival of cooler weather with a variety of outdoor and indoor decor. Pumpkins and mums are arranged on front porches. “Harvest” signs ironically adorn front doors in suburban neighborhoods. Cinnamon and apple scents and flavors dominate home decor stores. It’s all so wholesome, albeit a little cheesy.
Barely a few feet away from these more tasteful decorations sit the grotesque, garish, and disturbing statues which normal civilians see fit to erect sometime in September or October. These can only be described as a strange fascination with ugliness and death.
The least offensive of these “decorations” are ridiculous witch blow-up dolls that are more unbecoming of a reasonable homeowner’s lawn than deranged. The worst of them are evil-looking men strung up on trees to mimic hanging, demon-faced murderers carrying bloody weapons, or glowing skulls and skeletons rising from the dead to apparently haunt the neighborhood. Perhaps the less obvious, yet no less disgusting, decorations are the neatly arranged gravestones with no other sign to indicate it’s all a big joke than a scrawled “RIP.”
One wonders if the owners of these houses have had many encounters with the sadness and awful wonder of death themselves. Aside from a few biblical characters – including Jesus Christ himself – no one has come back from the dead.
Death is the most final thing we all can and must endure. For this reason, it is still more shocking that Christians, as some of these homeowners are, would make light of the thing over which our God has declared victory and dominion through the crucifixion of his only begotten Son.
Yet even homeowners who do not believe in God or an afterlife can admit that death is a sad thing. Almost everyone has at some point stood by the lowered casket of a beloved grandmother, a friend’s aged parent, or a young relation gone too soon.
Why, then, do we treat death so lightly, especially at this time of year?
Perhaps our dismissal of our forefathers’ violent tirades against the occult have backfired. By scoffing at the Puritans for burning witches, we rejected the idea that one should be disturbed by death and witchcraft in the first place. Indeed, our societal desensitization is not just bad for our souls, it has turned into an aesthetic nightmare in American neighborhoods.
This year, we should bring back autumn as a time of celebration of a good harvest and the end of the summer toils. In fall, we prepare ourselves for the most American, and one of the most Christian, holidays of all: Thanksgiving. In a more rural society, the return of the crisp cold would be associated with rest after a summer of weary labor, and the time where students may finally return to their studies. Celebrations would be in order. Feasts would be had.
More than that, however, we must return to an era of innocence, where paying money to be terrified (i.e. a haunted house) is treated as the strange action of an adrenaline-junky, rather than how a normal citizen should act. Subjecting your neighbors to such strange celebrations of death is nothing but socially acceptable antisocial behavior.
In the end, the point isn’t that your $1,200 Costco lawn ornament of a pale demon is actually scary to anyone above the age of seven. What is scary is that anyone would spend good money on such a massive statement of their own ghastly and tasteless sense of humor.
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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.
Image Credit: Flickr-Jake Cvnningham, CC BY 2.0
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Phillip Amidon
October 9, 2025, 6:32 pmCan We Christians Celebrate Halloween in a Church Building?
Yes, of course we can.
Halloween, as practiced in America, is in no way an atheist pageant.
Halloween is a one night, light hearted occasion where we folks celebrate the fun of dressing up in silly costumes and knocking on our neighbor’s doors.
This non-religious and happy custom is handed down from our Northern European ancestors…Some examples are:
“Guy Fawkes Night” in England…a masked celebration with bonfires.
“Samhain” in Ireland, which celebrates the end of “Harvest” and the beginning of the “Dark Season” with pumpkin carving, costumes and bonfires.
“Mummering” in Newfoundland and Philadelphia, a night of silly costumes and knocking on the neighbor’s door…
So Halloween is a joyful chance to playfully conceal our identities and visit our neighbors.
So, can we Christians celebrate Halloween in a church building?
Yes, of course we can.
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