There’s no easy way for me to say this, so I’m just going to come out with it. I’m sick of Christians ruining Halloween. Sick. Of. It.
I’ve been discussing pleasure with my therapist lately—or mostly shame, but pleasure as its converse—and this week it’s all gotten wrapped up in this idea that if you believe in Jesus Christ, you’re not supposed to dress up and ask for or give little kids candy.
My parents no longer celebrate Halloween. They stopped after I was out of the house, but it still bothers me, because I know how many kids live in their neighborhood and I remember what fun it was to do. They don’t because they “don’t celebrate pagan holidays.” Everything in me wanted to scream that their holy days, like Christmas and Easter were pagan sabbats overlaid with liturgy and ritual—passion to disguise the rites of so-called ignorant heathens. But I kept it all inside, because I did start on something like that at one point and my mother said, “God doesn’t like it when you’re a smart ass.”
But before there was Halloween there were restrictions. When I was 15, one of my parents friends sat down to have a talk with me about why I liked a “demonic” show like Star Trek: The Next Generation. Demonic! I don’t even remember what I said. Perhaps I was too flabbergasted that I was about to be denied one of my primary pleasures because one of the actors wore strange makeup. Klingons are only demonic on Crazy Pentecostal Planet.
And then I was not allowed to read Cosmopolitan. I was the only 17 year old in the whole world, it seemed like, for whom science fiction and the Agony Column were equally contrabanded. As my family got more and more devout and I had to follow them more and more, less and less of what I was interested in seemed relevant. We’d never been allowed to enjoy food, but now I wasn’t supposed to read certain things. I wasn’t supposed to watch certain things. I certainly wasn’t supposed to stay out too late with boys.
In college, I majored in the wrong thing—it wasn’t useful and I was spending too much time studying Beatniks, who everybody knows were worthless and disgusting and did drugs and fucked each other in the ass. I was getting too much learning and being uppity. I can remember at age 21, home for the summer, having the remote control summarily ripped from my hands because I was watching The Simpsons. I didn’t got to church. I didn’t talk about anything anybody could understand. I stayed up all hours on the internet talking to people I didn’t know! I watched The X-Files! While drinking beer! It’s amazing I didn’t turn into a pillar of salt.
This mindset actually kept me from reading Harry Potter until just this past spring. And I know you must be thinking, “Well, obviously they knew something wasn’t right with it, as it ate your face, Sarah.” But when I told my mom, “I did read Harry Potter mom, and a portal to hell didn’t open up next to me,” she said, “It doesn’t always happen right away.” In my head, this is just as good as saying, “Watch out! Portal to hell! Any minute!”
And maybe she’s right. I obviously want to celebrate evil, pagan Halloween. I want to hand out candy to little kids who get dressed up like Spiderman. I’m just having a hard time figuring out how that makes the baby jesus cry.
