Thinking Tree Thoughts: Halloween

When our son decided to be C3PO for Halloween, we probably should have thought about it for a minute before heartily supporting the idea. Maybe it was his cute rendition of the robot’s walking style.

”Wait, wait, for me!”

Maybe it was the fact that he picked something unique and representative of his current interests. Whatever it was, we said, “great!”

And then I started looking for a costume.

Nothing at Target.

Nothing cheap on-line.

So, no problem, we decided to make a C3PO costume.

First there was a box and some leftover wires for hanging out of the box. Then there was an idea to spray paint it gold, and one thing led to another and I was running out to the grocery store at 10 p.m. to buy 7 more 2-liter bottles of Diet Coke and other assortments of soda. This gave us the golden body, arms and legs. But the C3PO head was missing.

I started shopping around at Halloween stores. Nothing. I called a half dozen other stores around LA and slowly realized that the only way to get a C3PO head was to order it on-line. And it was Thursday. I refused to pay $30 overnight shipping for a $6 plastic mask.

So then we began to brainstorm how to create the same look. I found a white vinyl mask at Goodwill, which we cleaned up. Kip spray painted it and used a Dremel tool to fashion two spray paint tops into C3PO eyes. And finally, late Thursday night, we had a C3PO costume.

Our daughter wasn’t so difficult this year. She found a very authentic pair of 80’s punk rock pants at a thrift store. Then she added a pink feather boa and decided to be a rock star.

I settled on a Sacagawea costume, about 5 minutes before we headed off to a fabulous homeschool Masquerade Ball Saturday night. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of the Masquerade Ball, but it was lot of fun and certainly showcased the LA homeschooling community's flare for creativity.

Winning most creative costume at the Cub Scout Halloween bash on Friday night, day one of our three-day celebrations.

Most creative trophy

We had an extra friend for the Halloween weekend. One of my best friends had an opportunity to get out of town for a weekend, so we said, sure, we would love to have an extra kid for a few days. Actually I was a little concerned about candy consumption because sugar used to be a big taboo for this kid.

But when I asked her mom how they were handling Halloween candy this year, she said, "I'm sending her to her friend's house." Thanks. : )

She was the happiest Goth I have ever seen.

C3PO and our serious rock star

I'm Sacagawea, not Pocahontas. He is C3PO, not the tin man. And she is a rock star, really.

On Sunday the kids dressed in their costumes for a third day in a row and we went to the Costume Carnival hosted by the Oasis. It was all-out fun with music, food, an inflatable obstacle course, rock wall and mechanical bull. It was totally free and also a little crowded, but still some of the best not-exactly Halloween fun this side of town.

C3PO sheds his constrictive shell and ascends the inflatable rock wall.

That kid was loving the upside down jumpy thing.

Racing through the obstacle course.

Kip, being an incredibly good sport, holding bits and pieces of the kids' costumes while they played.

Sacagawea getting in on the obstacle course action. It's really nothing after scaling the Rocky Mountains with a baby on her back.

This little cutie rode the mechanical bull like it was a penny pony.

Ready

Set...

GO!

No hands, Mom!

Then, despite being exhausted after days of costumed fun, and for Kip, running 13 miles in marathon training on Saturday and playing guitar at four back-to-back church services on Sunday, we took the kids trick or treating.

And finally the trick or treating. Everyone loved C3PO's costume.

I'm hoping this wasn't a bad idea.

And then they ate dinner.

My family didn’t celebrate Halloween when I was a kid, a decision I understood and supported as a child, seeing how it was the Devil’s holiday and all.

We didn’t trick or treat. We didn’t carve pumpkins. We didn’t dress up as scary, ghoulish things. And we didn’t drape our home in orange and black, spiders and skulls, witches and death.

I heard all the stories of how Halloween originated with Druids collecting blood from door to door, medieval Christians scaring away evil spirits in preparation for All Saints Day, people praying to dead ancestors, and more recently, Satanists sacrificing babies on Halloween.

It all seemed like good reasons to abstain. And I hated the whole Halloween season.

I hated when strangers in the grocery store asked me what I was going to dress up as. I hated feeling left out in public school when teachers assumed that Halloween was a safe, nonreligious holiday that everyone could celebrate. I hated candy corn because it had that guilty orange and yellow coloring.

The whole month of October made me uncomfortable.

But ironically, I actually looked forward to Halloween night, second only to Christmas, birthdays, Easter and maybe the 4th of July.

On Halloween, in the buckle of the Bible belt, Evangelical churches out did each other every year with their “Harvest” parties. There were carnival games, costume contests, mazes, prizes and candy galore. And it seemed that every sizeable congregation from the tongue-talking Pentecostals to the Bible-quoting Baptists had something going on that night.

And I loved it.

But when I became a parent, far from the Bible belt, I hated Halloween season even more. I hated the costumes coming out in stores. I hated how every ugly display frightened my pre-school age daughter. I hated how strangers in the grocery store always asked us what we were going to dress up as. I hated that friends made me feel like I was depriving my children of an American rite of passage.

So I avoided Halloween altogether.

But the problem I had was that the church culture around me was changing its opinion of Halloween and I had to deal with it. By this time I was involved in Evangelical church communities who were questioning a lot of what we had previously accepted about the intersection of faith and culture.

Very subtly I had grown from being a child basking in the warmth of an isolationist family to a parent discovering daily what it means to follow Christ in all things and to live faithfully in this culture that God has placed our family in.

I’m currently learning how to not separate and live a monastic, culture-free life, but to become a culturally-engaged part of the greater community while being faithful to God and His redemptive purposes.

Yeah, headful isn’t it. I’m not sure what it means yet either.

Part of that means I question the value of restricting myself to the boundaries of Christian art and culture – Christian music, Christian books, Christian T-shirts, Christian lingo. I think some of that is nice for the Christian community, but it seems to alienate everyone else and that seems counter productive for a community called to emulate the man who was “a friend of sinners.”

So six years ago, when a friend invited me to a kids’ Halloween party at her house, I went.

I was a little uncomfortable, but appreciated the creative energy poured into making crafts and themed food for the kids. But I still declined invitations from other friends to join their families for trick or treating. I just couldn't embrace that.

During this time I talked to lots of different people about Halloween and I read a Catholic priest’s (unfortunately I can’t remember who!) perspective on the history of Halloween and its place in the Church. He made an interesting point of the significance of medieval Christians using Halloween as an artistic way to recognize their own mortality. We all die. We all face judgment for our moral decisions. I can understand that.

But maybe more importantly, I came to accept the concept that children dressing up as imaginary characters and gathering candy from neighbors was not inherently bad.

Two years ago our family dabbled in trick or treating, hitting up a couple blocks with our pastor and his four kids. And then last year we went all out, everyone dressing up, attending a community Halloween carnival and trick or treating with a large group of families. It was kind of fun and my kids loved it – especially the “with a large group of families” aspect of it.

But honestly, Halloween still makes me a little comfortable. And I think the caveat is that I believe in a literal Satan – not a comical red-horned, pitch-forked cartoon, but a real evil force waging war on humanity. I don’t think celebrating Halloween is tantamount to worshiping the Devil, but it does seem to mock spiritual things in a discrediting way that undermines our struggle against evil.

And Now .....

This year Kip carved pumpkins with the kids. The kids each designed their own costumes and we went to two Halloween parties.

The first was on Friday night at the Nickelodeon studio. One of our friends works there and gave us tickets to their in-house party. The kids decorated cookies and “trick-or-treated” through the office cubicles. Ironically, having grown up watching Nickelodeon, I was more impressed with the location then they were.

As my 11-year-old daughter pointed out, It’s just Sponge Bob.

But it was a fun party and a nice family time.

On Saturday night, actual Halloween, we went with Kip and his band to a Harvest party at a church in Ventura. Unlike the parties of my childhood, this one was in the church’s parking lot and was a clear, open invitation to everyone in the neighborhood. The costumes weren’t restricted to Biblical characters and there was no one distributing anti-Halloween cartoon tracks.

There were moon bounces and face painting, cotton candy and carnival games. Last year at the community sponsored Halloween carnival my kids bought tickets and got to bounce for a couple minutes while a sweaty line of costumed kids impatiently waited for their turns. This year the kids played in the moon bounce for hours, stopping only to run over to the cookie decorating booth and pumpkin bowling.

My kids and the friend we brought along loved it.

Everything was given as a free gift to the community and the only advertisement for the church was a banner across the band stage that announced the services at 10 a.m. If I lived in Ventura, I’d visit that church. The people there clearly wanted to get to know their neighbors. Maybe they are finding a better way to inch toward a healthy balance of faith and culture.