More trick than treat...

In the cold light of the morning after the monsters of the night before I'm still feeling uncomfortable with Halloween...

Yes, it was great seeing some of our neighbours and their kids come round.

Yes, it was great that my son wanted to give sweets to the 'big' girls next door, so much so that when they hadn't arrived by his bedtime we went out and found them ( he must get his kindness and generousity from his mother :).

No, it wasn't a post evangelical hangover from fears of being tainted with celebrating some cultic pagan festival.

I think what troubles me last night is what troubled me last year - the sheer consumer blow out that halloween represents.

For example:

...hearing from Debs that our giant supermaket was completely sold out of chocolate just makes me feel a little hollow - on the one hand it was great that so many people feel generous enough to buy enough candy to empty 2 whole aisles in a supermaket (heh we were trying to do the same but had to settle for 10p packets of harribo :) on the other i feel almost forced by the system to make that choice.

or

...seeing the all marketing shebang that the kids were wandering around with, kitted out completely for halloween, plastic pumpkin bucket for some reason were what stood out for me.

Here i think is the the centre of my angst - i am rich enough and fortunate enough to live somewhere nice enought be able to take part in a contrived marketing fest which is celebrated by everyone one else who is also rich enough and fortunate enough to do. It's a festival of self indulgent consumption and heck i do like to consume and self indulge - i feel a little like a cow led by the nose with my head stuck in a trough where the feed never stops pouring in - just eat and eat and eat. I never wonder why i am being fed, why the system i am part of encourages me to keep eating, i just keep filling my face...

I live in a very nice place in London where people feel free to walk down the street and knock on random doors, in fact just a few doors down one of our neighbours is a community police officer who assures us that there is no crime at all in our urban village!

I am very aware though that that just a couple of miles from where I live you would be far too scared to do either walk down the street or open the door if it was knocked on. In London this year alone there have been 22 violent murders of teenagers with either guns or knives, which as one commentator notes "more teenagers have been killed with a gun or a knife on the streets of the capital in 2007 than the number of British teenage soldiers killed while fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan."

And of course mention of places like Iraq and Afghanistan etc makes me uncomfortable thinking of the billions of dollars that halloween rakes in from people like me taking part in the consumer fest without blinking at the price tag and quibble at the cost of ending the vast inequities that millions of people in such countries experience everyday - apart from to nod my head with the media consensus that fighting over there is such a waste of young life and we should bring our troops back home.

I find the growing feeling within myself that Halloween this year was mostly all trick and no treat. Maybe its the coming down from the sugar high of yesterday a brief moment of clarity before my head goes back down into the trough for the next over indulging consumer feedfest of christmas (only 54 shopping  days to go!) but i really wonder what else as a christian, or merely as a responsible citizen of this planet that I can do differently...

So I wonder what are you thinking or doing in the light of all this?

Comments

[Makeesha Fisher]

I hear ya. I was about to blog about this very thing. Instead I'll just point to you. hehe

We just did the best we could to engage and simultaneously subvert - which is pretty much an extremely overly simplistic way to explain "living the mission" (in my opinion)

We don't get trick or treaters anyway so that part is sort of irrelevant for us.

[Sue]

I hear ya too. As if we don't have enough rituals in our Western culture as it is, without them all being coopted as commodities.

We need to begin to create more rituals, don't we :)

[brad brisco]

Paul, thanks for bringing this up. I too really struggle with Halloween and not for the "historical roots" or "devil worship" concerns but simply out of the attitude of the whole thing. I mean we are sending our kids, many times to houses of people they have never got to know, and almost demanding in some cases free goodies. We over indulge with it all, and I am not just talking about the candy.

I was getting a hair cut on Tuesday by a gal that I have been trying to build a relationship with (she is a single mother of three) and she was telling me all that she had done for her children to celebrate halloween. She spent over $300 on their costumes. I thought, and for what? I know she is strapped for $ but this is the "American way" of Halloween. BTW the place I go to get a hair cut was closing early for Halloween? Sorry for the rant!

[Lyn]

Paul, I've been pondering your post since I read it yesterday. I really agree about the consumerism, but my thoughts go further. I totally agree with what Brad has written above. I've posted my own thoughts, if you are interested in reading them. http://lyn.lifeshapedfaith.com/2007/11/halloween-thoughts/

[Paul]

Thanks Mak, clearly great bloggers think a like :). It is hard to know how to be subversive, i think that is what bugs me the most -limited consumer participation seems to be about as far as i've got too :)

Oh and i'm loving your new revolutionary slogan, livin the mission :)

[Paul]

Thanks Sue, i kida agree with the idea but then the only problem with that is i can see the market just taking those new rituals and comodifying them as well :(

[Paul]

thanks brad, it is really strange when we break it down into the component parts. And we just get sucked into the whole excess thang so easy, i wanna rant at myself, lol.

hope you got a good hair cut :)

[Pau]

thanks lyn, you have writen a good post. there is no doubt in my mind that halloween has a darkside and the fear factor, vandalism, crime etc that occurs is part of that. Fernado has writtena good post dealing with the fascination with death and things that go bump and how halloween relates to that part of our life:
http://fernandogros.com/?p=1059

[Sue]

The market will take and commodify anything, - but be that as it may, we still need them. Where are our rites of passage, our ways of marking off significant life events, our celebration as a community?

Gee, you'd think the Church would get off her arse and start the ball rolling, wouldn't you :) (which is exactly what I think we are going to begin to see ...)

[Laura Anne]

Our church has started something called 'Just Christmas' with a vision to challenge exactly what you are blogging about here.

It really does make me feel sick, and even worse when I myself get sucked in by the marketing and materialism...

[Paul]

Thanks Laura Anne, that sounds interesting, could you explain a bit more about it?

[paul]

Thanks Sue, yes i think that some of us are rediscovering some of the rituals and rights which help us live our lives by a different liturgy, or at least find some reflective space to challenge our usual ones.

[Laura Anne]

Well, there is a cheesy video on the site that has been set up www.justchristmas.org.uk

But the basic idea is challenging people into halving what they would usually spend on Christmas and donating whatever they save to the Just Christmas fund which will go to the Dalits in India, and something else...hang on....let me check....a charity in Kenya training practitioners in responding to HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa.

Other underlying things are looking a creative ways in which we can be making Christmas about what Christmas was meant to be about...something I'm all for, as I do have a bee in my bonnet about what I call 'santamas'...

[Paul]

Thanks Laura Anne, v cool :)

I'll look forward to hearing what creative ways you come up with? :)

[Patti Blount]

You could half what you are spending on Halloween, Christmas, Easter, New Years, and any other consumeristic holiday and send some of that money to the persecuted church in impoverished nations. My husband and I have been supporting our Christian brothers and sisters now for about 12 years, where our one dollar is multiplied many times over to help feed, clothe, and teach skills to widows and orphan children who know the Lord but whose daily necessities are not met because of oppresive governments or cultural pracitices. The ministry we do this through is InJesusName.org. We have known the director personally for those 12 years, and last year went to India to encourage the believers there and to finally meet those we had supported. What a blessing it was! I have names of Pastors who have needy congregations who we visited who have little to no support. If you are seriously interested in getting information, you could contact me or the ministry itself. My e-mail address is:pmb24@bellsouth.net. This is a wonderful way of making us of our excessiveness as we support the Body of Christ world-wide. The Lord's house lies in ruins while we fiddle!