#1127 Harvesting Pagans

Halloween¾it’s like the frustration of orthodontia, a person’s original bite reasserting and realigning itself years after braces. Or the former color of wall bleeding through the new paint.
Halloween is just relentlessly pagan.
I remember when I was in grade school, the local Baptists objected to the school having a Halloween celebration. I’m not sure if it was because it was perceived as devil worship or if the Baptists knew the origin of the name Halloween was from the Catholic All Hallows Eve and they hated all things Catholic.
Years later, similar protests happened and the schools caved and started calling it a “Harvest Festival.” Which is funny, because that’s what it always was to the pagans.
Maybe the whole problem is the pagans were into that whole calendar changing thing. What goes around comes around. And the seasons continue to change.
Easter was originally a pagan celebration about spring and rebirth and fertility. That’s why you got your eggs and rabbits. Halloween was originally about harvesting and plants dying and death and stuff as the days shortened and winter was approaching. So pumpkins and turnips were carved into representations of the dead. Spirits and skeletons were imagined and depicted. And the cycle of life and death was honored.
Then along came the Christians, who, knowing it was easier to borrow than repress, rebranded and co-opted the pagan festivals. Easter-time now celebrated Christ’s rebirth.
But there was no convenient biblical crossover event for the time of Halloween so they created All Saints Day. And then called the night before All Hallows Eve, which was then shortened to Hallows Evening or Hallowe’en.
Flash forward to modern times, Halloween has lost its hallows again and instead is populated with haunts. The church rebels against its own name, Halloween, and insists we all celebrate harvest festivals.
Or like this one local church, a “Pumpkin Bash.” As a result, they’ve actually got right back to the festival’s pagan roots. Harvesting dead squash and carving them up to look like spirits.
They may have made a lantern after him but they don’t know Jack.
The devil is, that pagan thing is strong.
What goes around comes around...
America, ya gotta love it.