Cathleen Falsani: Is Halloween appropriate for my child?

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Ultimately, the answer is yes, because this is a night that can transcend.

By CATHLEEN FALSANI, Religion News Service

Last update: October 30, 2009 - 7:00 PM

Today is 10-year-old son Vasco's first Halloween. He arrived in the United States from Africa just a few months ago, and as far as we can discern there is no such holiday in his native Malawi.

But as a fourth-grader here in southern California, Vasco is all about Halloween. He's been drawing skeletons and jack-o'-lanterns in art class, and his classmates are abuzz talking about what costumes they'll be wearing when they go trick-or-treating this weekend.

My most vivid childhood memory of Halloween is from 1977, the year we moved to a new neighborhood in Connecticut. I don't recall what my costume was, but I do remember going door-to-door with my father, meeting new neighbors and collecting a heavy bag of candy, as the suburban warren of Cape Cods and manicured lawns morphed into an otherworldly fairyland.

I was 7 years old, the new kid on the block, so when the cover of darkness fell at sunset, I hadn't a clue where I was. When my father navigated our way home in the crisp autumn night, it felt like he had done a magic trick. When morning came, I couldn't believe our adventure the night before had been on these same streets. It felt as if we had been walking through Narnia or Rivendell rather than a sleepy New England suburb.

A few years later, my family stopped celebrating Halloween. We had become born-again Christians and our Southern Baptist church frowned on the practice. Halloween, I was taught, was an occult holiday (or maybe even Satanic!) and good Christians should have nothing to do with it. So while other kids in the neighborhood continued their annual nighttime pilgrimage, we would stay in or go to a church youth group function. My mother, God bless her, even tried handing out religious tracts to the trick-or-treaters. (Not a popular choice, if memory serves.)

I'm a new mother and I'm still a Christian, so when the Halloween candy aisle appeared at the local grocery store, I wondered for a moment what to do. But then, recalling that magical night 32 years ago, I decided that if he chose to, Vasco could celebrate Halloween with all the trimmings -- costumes, jack-o'-lanterns, plastic spiders and spray-on webs, spooky music, face paint, and trick-or-treating.

One of the best descriptions of Halloween's transcendent and experiential meaning comes from a book called "Seeking Enlightenment ... Hat by Hat: A Skeptic's Path to Religion" by Nevada Barr. In it the author says: "Halloween traditionally was the night we were given the freedom to explore the dark -- not to find and be the evil but to see that the night was as beautiful as the day, that we were powerful, others were kind, that there was candy behind those closed doors and strangers who gave us treats."

Halloween's roots are in the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, which marked the end of the harvest and the coming of winter -- a transition from the lightest days of the year to the darkest.

The Celts taught that the physical and spiritual worlds existed side-by-side, separated by a thin veil, and during Samhain that veil was so thin it was nearly transparent.

Thin moments are, to me, those times when we can see most clearly God's hands reaching into the world, whether it's in the sacred space of a church sanctuary or the beckoning welcome of a neighbor's open front door on an autumn night.

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