Conversations I'm tired of having:

If you're online a lot, there's a lot of conversations that just go round and round, without resolution because we are all inherently stubborn. Here's an example: 

Christians who don't "do" Halloween. 

I'm not talking about "celebrating". I'm talking about the contingent of people, probably all Christians, who refuse to acknowledge Halloween. 

Now, you will never find a bigger party pooper than me. I don't like Costumed Events, as we can call them. I am not creative. I'm not confident of my appearance or decision when it comes to choosing costumes. I have dressed up like four times in my adult life. Halloween at school is my least favorite thing. In fact, I loved my one district that just refused to do it: Halloween was for at home, not at school. But that's a whole separate conversation. 

I'm talking about the parents who take their last stand believing that doing Halloween as a family is evil. They believe they are opening the doors to hell by attending a trunk or treat or letting their kids dress up as Spiderman and Elsa. Like just the very act of acknowledging Halloween is sinful and a testament to the depravity of our fallen world or whatever. 

And I get that. 

Many even choose to do Reformation Day instead and, honestly, if I knew anything about Reformation Day, I might do the same. 

But here's the thing: refusing to let your kids dress up in a costume or pass out candy to friends isn't going to move the needle in your parenting journey. It's going to likely just create a weird divide you have to explain to your small child.

I went through this too, thinking that I wasn't going to do Halloween with my kids. See, because I don't care about Halloween one way or the other, it would've been really easy to be like We're not doing Halloween. But when did I care about Halloween? When I was a kid. I dressed up in costumes and went to parties and trick-or-treated for years....and I am not a devil worshipper as an adult. If we're being generous, I'm totally indifferent on Halloween. So taking a walk on the side of reality would let us see that Halloween is simply a fun tradition for kids. I'm not looking at it deeper than that. 

If your neighborhood has all those weird scary decorations, eh. I don't like that. But carving pumpkins and corn mazes and costumes and trick-or-treating are core childhood memories. I remember Halloween parties my mom did when I was a kid. I remember parties and parades at school. I remember trick-or-treating. I remember all my costumes. It's really fun for kids. 

Over the last few years, my kids have done parties at school and we did trunk-or-treat at Scott's unit. This year, with no school and no unit, I took them to Boo at the Zoo with friends and we'll trick-or-treat in the neighborhood on Friday. 

Here's my plan: for years, we've had no trick-or-treaters because we've lived in the country. This year, I'm going to just leave a container of treat bags on the porch with a sign and the light on. They can take one, they can take them all, I don't care. I'm assuming we'll just walk the block. 

But what I've wanted to do for years was to hand out gospel tracts. I've just never had a chance. This year, I started thinking about the best way to facilitate that. I started looking online for something I could print out and put in a treat bag. Nothing. Nothing that was free was cute. Anything cute had to be ordered from Etsy or something. No thanks. I had an idea, based on something I heard on a podcast years ago. So I made my own. 

I put this file into my Teachers Pay Teachers for anyone to download for free, mostly because I was so annoyed that I couldn't find what I wanted online. I want it available to everyone if you want something to hand out as well! 

It's not fancy or long, but it's super basic and that's what the point is: the less the wording, the more likely it will be read. 

Of all the things to make your last stand on as a parent, I just don't think taking the Christian position of "Halloween is all bad and we refuse to acknowledge it" is the best use of your time. 

The hill I chose last night, for example, was to make Wells stay up late cleaning his room because his little friends came over and destroyed the place. And then he created this out of pipe cleaners:

We have bigger problems, as parents, than costumes on Halloween.