Why We Stopped Celebrating Halloween

Warning: Some pictures in post not suitable for children.

As a kid growing up my favorite holiday was Christmas, but a very close second was Halloween. I loved dressing up and going trick-or-treating, and as I grew up and had a family of my own my love for Halloween grew. I always dressed up and had fun costumes for my children. We made a big deal out of Halloween. We loved trick-or-treating and trunk-or-treat, and I hosted a Halloween party for our friends and neighbors every year. I loved Halloween, but something happened. Over the years I started to have an uneasy feeling about the holiday. I started to really think about Halloween, what it represented, what it promoted, and then we decided to stop celebrating it. Here are some of my thoughts, and some of the reasons we stopped celebrating Halloween.

My uneasy feelings first started when we were at a ward Halloween party in the church. I stopped and looked around at the costumes, the hallways, and the decorations. Someone was dressed as a devil and there were others dressed in very creepy, dark costumes. The lights were off in the hallways and the classrooms were decorated with Halloween decorations. In that moment I also thought about Halloween in our other wards through the years. Most of our wards celebrated Halloween, going all out, some complete with spook alleys in the church. The thought came to me, “How does God feel about his house being used to celebrate the devil, because that’s what someone is doing when they dress up as the devil, and how does he feel when we make a party of and glorify frightening, spooky, and dark things in his very house.

I contrasted the things of Halloween with the temple. We would never see the temple grounds decorated for Halloween, although it is decorated for Christmas and Independence Day. The thought seems almost laughable. It’s hard to imagine the temple grounds with spider webs on all the fences, zombies coming out of tombs on the lawn, bloody footprints down the sidewalks and ghosts or dead bodies in every tree. I think it’s so impossible for our minds to imagine because Halloween and the temple are so decidedly the opposite of each other. The temple is a holy place, a place of peace, beauty, light, and God. Things associated with Halloween are eerie, spooky, and meant to induce fear, the opposite of peace. They are also meant to scare, and they focus on darkness, the opposite of light. They are often gory, grim, and definitely gloomy, all opposites of what the temple stands for. Don’t we want our church buildings to emulate and feel like the temple, and don’t we want our homes to emulate the temple as well. In fact, we have repeatedly been told to make our homes like the temple.

“Only the home can compare with the temple in sacredness.” This suggests a sacred relationship between the temple and the home. Not only can we symbolically turn the doors of our homes to the temple, or the house of the Lord; we can also make our homes a “house of the Lord.” Couples in the temple are often counseled that their homes are to become mini-temples. “Even if you have to live in a tent in a vacant lot,” President Spencer W. Kimball said, “look upon your home as a sanctuary.” (Sacred Homes, Sacred Temples, Elder Gary E. Stevenson)

So, if our homes are sacred and we should make our homes like the house of the Lord, what does that say about the kind of decorations and the things we should allow in our homes.

“In a stake conference, all present were invited by the visiting authority, Elder Glen Jenson, an Area Seventy, to take a virtual tour of their homes using their spiritual eyes. I would like to invite each of you to do this also. Wherever your home may be and whatever its configuration, the application of eternal gospel principles within its walls is universal. Let’s begin. Imagine that you are opening your front door and walking inside your home. What do you see, and how do you feel? Is it a place of love, peace, and refuge from the world, as is the temple? Is it clean and orderly? As you walk through the rooms of your home, do you see uplifting images which include appropriate pictures of the temple and the Savior? Is your bedroom or sleeping area a place for personal prayer? Is your gathering area or kitchen a place where food is prepared and enjoyed together, allowing uplifting conversation and family time? Are scriptures found in a room where the family can study, pray, and learn together? Can you find your personal gospel study space? Does the music you hear or the entertainment you see, online or otherwise, offend the Spirit? Is the conversation uplifting and without contention? That concludes our tour. Perhaps you, as I, found a few spots that need some “home improvement”—hopefully not an “extreme home makeover.” (Gary E Stevenson (2009) Sacred Homes, Sacred Temples)

What if we did this around Halloween time. Do the decorations we have point us toward Christ and the temple? Do they bring the Holy Ghost, light, peace, and love, or do we have decor like this:

It’s not just the Halloween decorations that are creepy, so is the food.

God has told us that our bodies are temples as well as our homes. 1 Corinthians 3:16-17 it says, “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and [that] the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” Our bodies are sacred and holy and should be treated as such. Are these pictures making bodies seem sacred and holy or do they make our bodies spectacles of fear and disgust?

And while we are on the subject of the body being sacred let’s talk about costumes. Because our bodies are sacred and holy, we should dress them and treat them like they are sacred and holy, filled with light and truth, like the temple. I feel like kid’s and adult costumes are getting creepier and more gory every year.

These pictures make me so sad. They also make me think about how sad God must be when we dress up these beautiful, sweet, innocent children in gruesome, gory, creepy, costumes, the opposite of what children are and should be. These costumes aren’t uplifting, honorable or wholesome, they aren’t fitting of children of God. Sadly, I did not have to look far and wide to find these pictures. A simple Pinterest search of kid’s scary Halloween costumes will bring these pictures up.

I love that God tells us plainly throughout the scriptures how to discern if something is good or bad. In the book of Moroni He tells us,

“ Wherefore, all things which are good cometh of God: and that which is evil cometh of the devil.” …”behold, that which is of God inviteth and enticeth to do good continually; Wherefore, everything which inviteth and enticeth to do good and to love God, and to serve him is inspired of God.” “But whatsoever thing persuadeth men to do evil and believe not in Christ, and deny him, and serve not god, then ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of the devil…” (Moroni 7:12-17)

Moroni 7:11 tells us that “a bitter fountain cannot bring forth good water…” We can’t decorate our houses with dark, creepy scary things and expect to have the spirit there. We can’t expect our children to have the spirit with them if they are dressed in bloody gore. We can’t expect to feel close to God and be filled with light and truth if we are celebrating fear, darkness, and violence. “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” (Matthew 6:24)

Another thing that made me uneasy about Halloween was that I started realizing how the Halloween costumes and decorations scared and affected my children. I think that children are often a lot more sensitive to spiritual things and things of darkness than we adults are. I have one particular daughter that would worry, when Halloween was approaching, every time that we went somewhere, that she would see something scary. I remember telling her it was only Halloween stuff and that she didn’t need to worry about it, it couldn’t really hurt her, and while that is true, I began to realize that I was in a way desensitizing her to these dark and scary things. I was telling her they were no big deal instead of realizing that her spirit was recognizing that they were dark, and they were scary. I want my children to be sensitive to recognizing when something isn’t from God, when something, is dark, when it gives them a bad feeling inside, so they can get away from it, and here I was decorating the house with it, making a party of it, and telling her it was okay.

The next thing that bothered me was haunted houses. A few years ago, my older boys asked if they could go to a haunted house with their friends.

Here is the commercial for our local haunted house, it’s call The Asylum.

And here is the local newspaper write up about it:

“They settled on an asylum theme in which mental patients have escaped their cells in part because Robert works in a hospital and because of the horror movie “The House on Haunted Hill.” The movie is set in an abandoned insane asylum where the head of the facility performs gruesome experiments and medical procedures on his patients, resulting in their deaths and trapping their souls in the asylum. The remaining patients who survive the doctor’s experiments escape their cells and burn the facility, killing almost all the staff. Years later, an eccentric millionaire offers a group of people an exorbitant amount of money to spend the night in the now-haunted asylum, which the ghosts of the patients find none too pleasing.”

I was so glad I researched it before letting our boys go. We talked with our children about entertainment and the things God wants us to surround ourselves with. In Philippians 4:8 it says, “…whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue and if there be any praise, think on these things.”

And the 13th article of faith says, “if there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report, or praise worthy we seek after these things. Something that is glorifying, and making entertainment out of gory, gruesome violence, insanity and murder doesn’t fit the bill. We should be seeking out activities that uplift us, make us feel good, bring the spirit, and bring us closer to God. We shouldn’t be seeking out activities that glorify death, murder, destruction, gore, violence, and fear.

In 2 Timothy 1:7 it says that “God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power and love.” Again, God tells us plainly how to discern if something is good or bad. Things that purposely bring about fear are not from God. Things of God bring peace, joy, and love.

An additional thing about Halloween that makes me uneasy starts with a post I saw on Facebook a while back, that I have thought so much about. In fact, I think about it almost daily. The post went something like this:

You are holding a cup of milk and someone walks by and bumps you causing you to spill the milk from your cup. Why did you spill your milk? Most people would say because someone bumped me, but the real answer is because you had milk in your cup. If you had had orange juice in your cup you would have spilled your orange juice, or if you had hot chocolate in your cup you would have spilled hot chocolate.

The point from this is that when we are bumped or stressed we spill what we have put in our cups. We give out what we take in. We can’t expect to fill our children with gruesome costumes, scary decorations, haunted houses, insane asylums, and let them play hours upon hours of shooting and killing games (this needs its own post in and of itself), feed them a diet of violence in movies and video games and expect them, when they are bumped, to spill good out. They are going to spill out what they have been putting in their cups. Mosiah 4:30 tells us that we must watch our thoughts, our words and our deeds. Our actions start with our thoughts, our thoughts usually start with the things we see and watch, so we can’t expect a generation that has been raised on an entertainment diet of gore, darkness, violence, and fear, to produce love tolerance, acceptance, light and truth. It simply will not happen.

You may be asking yourself what the big deal is? It’s not that bad? Our costumes aren’t that gruesome. Our decorations aren’t that scary. We don’t celebrate Halloween that way. I did that too, for years. I told myself it was all in good fun, and I wasn’t celebrating the bad parts of Halloween, but I’ve come to the conclusion that Halloween is a packaged deal. It isn’t possible to separate out the “good” parts of Halloween from the bad, we’ve all been trying to do it for years and it hasn’t worked. Isn’t that how Satan works, mixing the good with the bad, here a little, there a little so that it is so imperceptible at first that we don’t even realize something is bad. “The Devil leadeth with flaxen cord until he bindeth them with strong cords forever.” When was the last time you saw the good uplifting, sun-shiny, light and bright Halloween section in the store, or the Christ centered section of town for trick-or-treating.

If something isn’t pointing us toward light, truth, goodness, and Christ, then where is it pointing us? The very words we use to describe Halloween, creepy, chilling, eerie, spooky, frightening, sinister, gloomy, dark, show us where we are pointed. In 2 Nephi 26:23 God tells us, “the Lord God worketh not in darkness.” By celebrating Halloween we are desensitizing our children to darkness, and we are also signaling to our children that things of darkness are okay. It can’t be separated. We can’t have it both ways, either we celebrate Halloween and what it represents, or we don’t.

Elder Robert D. Hales said: “As Latter-day Saints we need not look like the world. We need not entertain like the world. Our personal habits should be different. Our recreation should be different…. Brothers and sisters, let’s sell that summer cottage in Babylon. Let us be not ‘almost’ but ‘altogether’ Latter-day Saints.”

Orson Pratt has said, “…may we put away from our minds everything calculated in its nature to shut out the spirit of the living God from our hearts.”

Jesus Christ is a god of Light, He is a god of truth, He is a god of virtue, goodness, joy, peace, holiness, and love. “…The Spirit of Christ is given to every man, that he may know good from evil; wherefore, I show unto you the way to judge; for everything which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of God.

“But whatsoever thing persuadeth men to do evil, and believe not in Christ, and deny him, and serve not god, then ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of the devil; for after this manner doth the devil work, for he persuadeth no man to do good, no not one; neither do his angels; neither do they who subject themselves unto him.” (Moroni 7:16-17)

For more on this subject see this video: