Halloween teaches the wrong thing

St. Albert Gazette, Oct 26 2011: There are times I despair of ‘sophisticated and cultured’ North American parents.

Recently, I watched a mother spending a small fortune on decorations for her child’s Halloween party. She had a shopping cart full of plastic dismembered legs and arms, gruesome looking masks, distended eyeballs, artificial blood, skeleton banners and props, and RIP grave markers.

In the U.S., Halloween is a seven-billion-dollar market. Here, too, stores advertise products: “half a body, with guts showing, yet somehow alive and crawling across the floor.”

This is the stuff of parties?? Parents, don’t your children have nightmares after seeing all this mayhem, or have we so desensitized them, that this doesn’t affect them? Already, do western children, when viewing TV news clips of the real horrors of war and death, see it all as entertainment?

What does your neighbour, still grieving the loss and burial of a beloved family member or friend, think of your ‘cute’ display of dug up graves? What do our immigrants, many having fled violence and atrocities, think when they see Halloween’s blatant fascination and even embracement of evil and death? What must factory workers in developing countries, making these macabre items for export, think of the mentality of western consumers?

Our culture’s rapidly increasing glamorizing of evil and violence and death is frightening. There is a well known saying: “as a man thinks, so he is.”

How much better to reverse this twisted trend by teaching our precious children principles on which our great country was built.

“Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things.” (Philippians 2:8 – from the Bible)

Pauline DeHaas, Sturgeon County

http://www.stalbertgazette.com/article/20111026/SAG0904/310269970/halloween-teaches-the-wrong-thing