Making peace with Halloween

REBECCA E. KOTKIN

Dr. Frankenstein's monster welcomes shoppers at the Moon Valley Pumpkin Patch.

Photo by Barry Cohen

My children start talking about Halloween in June. Not that I really blame them: The appeal of dressing in costume and collecting lots of candy cannot be overstated. The fact that they never eat most of the candy and that their costumes are covered by warm jackets doesn't seem to dim their enthusiasm. For months, they talk about what they will dress as. I don't get involved until mid-October when I am finally prepared to deal with another night of trick-or-treating.

I must admit, that as a Jewish parent, it never occurred to me to not let my children go out for Halloween. I know the connections to paganism and Christianity; but somehow, in my mind, Halloween has taken on a sense of secularism that the "national holidays" of Christmas and Easter never could.

Whatever its roots, Halloween has become a night where children dress up and go through the neighborhood collecting the loot. Even their synagogue preschool, while keeping talk of Halloween out of its curriculum, could never fully keep it out of the classroom.

My husband and I actually enjoy the costuming part. When my twin girls were 2, we dressed them as suffragettes in matching long skirts, straw boaters and signs advocating votes for women. As they paraded through the streets, they were met with the greeting, "Well done, Sister Suffragettes." It was probably our finest costuming hour, and we were very proud of our creativity. It felt fun to be part of the mainstream.

A Jewish approach to the holiday

Somehow, bedecking the house for Halloween is a different story. My children love holiday theme decorations and are always eager to hang things in the windows and on the doors. I remain uncomfortable with it. It seems very non-Jewish to me, but how can I distinguish the decorations from the trick-or-treating and explain it all to my 7-year-old daughters and 5-year-old son? As my neighbors put out their pumpkins and hang little ghosts on their trees, I wonder if I could just get into the spirit and treat Halloween as a combination pumpkin harvest and a day to pretend of being scared of little kids in spooky costumes.

I finally gave in and bought a cardboard skeleton and plastic spider web. Not too scary, just a little festive. This way, when my children look jealously at Christmas lights in a few weeks and bemoan the fact that we don't participate, perhaps they'll understand how we can delight in other people's celebration of that holiday without adopting it as our own.

Halloween is one holiday maybe we all can share; we'll allow ourselves to be part of the crowd this time. This way, I'm not the mean mom who won't ever decorate the house; I just choose my occasions.

If you make a spider web in any month except October, it's part of a study of arachnids. This season, it's part of a haunted house theme. But it doesn't have to stop there. As you work on the project, you can tell the Midrash of how the spider and its web saved David when Saul was ready to kill him.

Saul was jealous of David's growing prominence and didn't want him to be king so he and his army chased David into the mountains. Just as they were about to catch him, David ducked into a cave.

Miraculously and quickly, a spider magically wove an entire web over the whole mouth of the cave after David was inside. When Saul and his army came to the cave, they saw the web and concluded that such a large and complicated web would have taken hours for a spider to weave. Had David entered the cave, they reasoned, he would have torn the web apart so he must not be inside.

Saul and his followers moved on, and David was saved. Later, of course, he would become king.

Rebecca E. Kotkin is a contributing editor to JBooks.com.

Reprinted with permission from Jewish Family and Life.

Home