Tuesday, October 30
There's another good piece on the holiday in last weekend's National Review Online, which points out, in regard to some evangelical's warnings about Halloween:
It requires us to presume that the Christian church in the United States stood idly by for a century while this abomination became a national habit, and it was only when these current evangelical leaders came on the scene that anybody finally knew enough to stop it.
And then, concerning the function of the holiday:
Far from being a trauma, Halloween gives children an opportunity to confront the most fearsome facts of life — danger, powerlessness, human malevolence, and, most notably, death and decay — and, through exaggeration, domestication, and outright mockery, to diminish and ultimately defeat them by making them less alien and momentous.