Halloween is coming around again and nobody seems to be suggesting that it offends anyone as many suggest every year that Christmas does. No, Halloween is a pagan, nondiscriminating celebration of ghoulishness and death, and so, being an increasingly liberal nation that embraces nondiscriminating ghoulishness and death over righteousness and piety, Halloween has become a member in good standing in our national pantheon of holidays.

Once upon a time, school children made scary stuff starting around mid-October. No longer. Like all holidays legitimate or otherwise, Halloween came earlier this year. We hardly get past Labor Day anymore when the fake pumpkins, the cheap costumes and those big bags of candy start to appear on store shelves. September is barely out by the time we start to see lawns festooned with gravestones, cobwebs, witches, mummies, skeletons, demons, owls, spiders and all the rest. Halloween stores have become big business. And the really scary part is that increasingly they are catering to adults, not just kids.

At a time when genuine Christian church attendance is falling – replaced by faux churches populated by leftist political activists – and faith in the morality and virtue of our Founding Fathers is on the decline, Halloween is creeping in on little cat feet. Under the radar, Halloween has been incrementally promoted by the media, by the entertainment industry, by atheists, on college campuses, by the urban left, by the pagans and the wiccans and the nature worshippers. Aw heck, it’s just fun in our stressed-out lives, they tell us.

Hardly…

The rise of Halloween is a reflection of our decline into a childish, dressed-up hobgoblin fest of masks and costumes. Public schools have become bastions of fright, while city parades are conducted “for the children” on the public dime with no apparent call for separation of church and state – the pagan and atheist church of Halloween, that is.

Halloween today is an extension of another potemkin village – Hollywood – which is a place that has psychological problems that are almost beyond comprehension. And for very good reason. Because when you put on a mask, whether in a Hollywood film or on Halloween night, you are avoiding the most important question in life: Who am I?

Halloween? Hollywood? Those words are eerily similar, aren’t they.

On Halloween, increasing numbers of normal people are joining oddballs, freaks, self-haters, nihilists, satanists and myriad other practitioners of witchcraft, juvenile play-acting and other dark arts. Anyone who has seen or heard about the dreadful spectacle of New York City’s Halloween parade through the heart of Greenwich Village can witness cultural decline firsthand.

And to think of Halloween as anything but darkness is foolish. The Halloween celebrated in America today originated as a pagan Celtic festival of harvest. October 31 was seen as the day that the dead could threaten the living. Bonfires were built and masks and costumes were worn to mimic the evil spirits or to placate them. Irish immigrants brought Halloween to America, much to the consternation of the Puritans already here.

Halloween now is the second most popular holiday in America for decorating after Christmas. Salem, Massachusetts, famous for its witch trials, is called the Halloween Capital of America while Anoka, Minnesota bills itself Halloween Capital of the World.

Halloween offers a time for people to get outside their daily lives. For the kids, that is supposed to be fine, but in the developing picture, it is troubling because it is including increasing numbers of adults. It is not an escape into high culture or into God-ly contemplation of our place in the world, however, but simply a really low-rent diversion. Halloween is being pushed by the secular left which wishes to use it as a way to further separate us Americans from our Christian roots, ostensibly in the name of fun.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Today, a new phenomenon has developed. Young girls are taking the opportunity of Halloween to dress provocatively, all to the delight of the sexualized culture that thinks of Halloween as yet another opportunity to avail itself of another masked pleasure. Which is what the entire ‘pleasure culture’ of the left is based on – escape from our true selves into a childlike world without difficult decisions to make or serious responsibilities to undertake. This all is rooted in the big-brother socialism that promotes holidays like Halloween as we cede our power as individuals to government.

The buildup to Halloween today is a months-long process of anticipation for the Big Evening (or evenings) when adults now are allowed to become the children that socialism wishes for them to be. Those costumes and pumpkins may look like the harmless vestiges of an ancient past, but today they are the hallmarks of a rudderless society that is drifting farther from its progressive and freedom-loving roots to one that hides behind disguises in order to escape the hard work of finding out who we really are.

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