On Oct. 31, millions will celebrate Halloween. But did you know many Christians reject this dark holiday? What are some reasons not to celebrate Halloween?
Did you know that thousands of Christians around the world have made the choice to completely scrap Halloween for good?
They didn’t make that decision because they are grumps or cheapskates—or because they don’t like candy. (In fact, many of them appreciate candy very much!) They made that decision because there are serious spiritual problems with the celebration of this holiday.
The origins of Halloween are not very hard to discover. All you have to do is Google “what is the origin of Halloween?” (Interestingly, an average of more than 4,000 people Google that search phrase per month.) You will find a plethora of information on where Halloween came from.
What is the origin of Halloween?
Here is its origin in a nutshell:
Halloween is a combination of two separate observances—All Saints’ Day (All Hallows Eve) and the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sah-win).
All Saints’ Day was an observance created by the Roman Catholic Church to honor “all” the “saints” who weren’t assigned a specific day of commemoration. In Roman Catholicism, many saints are assigned a specific day to be honored on.
Halloween is a combination of two separate observances—All Saints’ Day and the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain.
After Catholicism was legalized and became the state religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, the Roman Church developed a tradition called canonization.
This was the process of declaring a man or woman a saint because of some heroic deed or act of faith. Those declared saints could then be venerated and prayed to as an intermediary to God.
Eventually the tradition developed to honor each particular saint on a certain day of the year—becoming that saint’s day. For instance, as I write this on Oct. 26, today is the Catholic feast day for Pope Evaristus, who is believed to have died in 107.
By the seventh century, the Roman Church had canonized so many “saints” that they couldn’t all have a calendar date, so May 13 was declared All Saints’ Day—in honor of all the saints who didn’t have a particular day of veneration. All Saints’ Day was officially moved to Nov. 1 by Pope Gregory IV in the ninth century.
Samhain was celebrated by lighting large sacrificial bonfires where crops were burned to honor the gods and costumes were worn to ward off the spirits of the dead.
Why was Nov. 1 picked for All Saints’ Day?
It is a generally accepted historical fact that Nov. 1 was selected to “counteract the pagan celebrations held on that date” (Strange Stories, Amazing Facts, p. 285).
In other words, to appeal to the pagan masses, a day was selected for the celebration that was already being observed by pagans. This was to help them transfer their loyalties. They could continue keeping their former celebration and many of its customs, but now under a “Christian” banner.
This is the basic origin of most of the holidays kept by mainstream Christianity.
The pagan festival that All Saints’ Day replaced was Samhain—an ancient Celtic festival that had many meanings and costumes.
Samhain marked the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter.
It was celebrated by lighting large sacrificial bonfires where crops were burned to honor the gods and costumes were worn to ward off the spirits of the dead that were believed to rise and wander around on the evening of Oct. 31.
Knowing these facts about Halloween’s origins has convinced thousands of Christians to stop celebrating it. Perhaps you will consider becoming one of them?
Watch this video for more insight on the problems of celebrating holidays rooted in ancient paganism.
Three reasons not to celebrate Halloween
With the origins and the practices of Halloween in mind, here are three reasons why we believe you should consider ditching Halloween from your (and your children’s) lives:
1. God forbids the merging of pagan customs into our lives.
“You shall not worship the LORD your God in that way; for every abomination to the LORD which He hates they have done to their gods” (Deuteronomy 12:31).
God demands purity of worship from His followers—not combining paganism with Christianity.
2. God wants us to avoid darkness.
Halloween is all about darkness. It glorifies and emphasizes dark characters of mythology—witches, wizards, vampires, ghosts and zombies. These are all associated with either death, Satanism or the occult.
The Bible is clear that we should “have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness” (Ephesians 5:11). No fellowship means no participation!
The entire celebration of Halloween—from the celebrations it sprang out of to the present, commercialized holiday—is based on the unbiblical idea that humans have an immortal soul and live on in another form after death.
The ancient Celts believed the souls of those in the Underworld wandered around on Samhain, and the Catholic All Souls’ Day is predicated on the belief that “canonized saints” are serving as mediators for God in heaven.
