I have a complicated relationship with this holiday. It began simply enough, with trick-or-treating country-style while we lived at a rural parsonage. The Halloween of my kindergarten year was marked by my dressing in a cat costume and piling into a car with some other church kids (One of whom, Becky, was dressed as a bag of garbage if I recall correctly and I sincerely doubt that I do) and driving around the range roads of northern Alberta where each farmyard would net us a full-size chocolate bar or several tasty Kool-Aid-infused popcorn balls.

We moved to a city the next year and I still trick-or-treated, but in the urban fashion, i.e. on foot. I was a (pink) rabbit.

But then, things changed. I don’t know what the impetus was, but my parents converted to the school of thought that Christians ought not celebrate Halloween in any manner, least of all gallavanting around the neighbourhood ringing doorbells. In later years, my mother explained to me that Halloween was quite a get for the devil: “It’s the two things kids love best: dressing up, and candy!”

To be fair, my brother and I did still get the candy; half an ice-cream pail each, not a bad haul for not having to leave the basement. Which is where we hung out, every Halloween, with all the upstairs lights turned out so as not to alert any trick-or-treaters to our residence. All the upstairs lights, that is, except one: the oven light, the door left ajar so it cast a ghoulish blue glow over the kitchen (but not down the hallway, where I skittered on my way to the bathroom only the most desperate of pee-breaks). And that, of course, was the most cutting irony. On the night in question, we the family who didn’t celebrate Halloween, had the creepiest house on the block.

I did have a few opportunities to dress up during my elementary years, even after the trick-or-treating ban. There was occasionally an alterna-Halloween party at the church, where costumes and candy were permitted but any mention of pumpkins or witches was not. One year I was a princess in a blue gown with a sparkly cape that was continually choking me as other party-goers stepped on it. Another year I was (and how’s this for Evangelical cred?) an Israellite. In a pink-and-white striped robe and matching headdress. Probably the less said about that, the better.

My parents’ aversion to Halloween was so instilled in me that even once I was ostensibly able to make my own decisions about celebrating the holiday I still responded to it with an overwhelming “meh.” Only in the past few years have I begun to tentatively embrace it. Because mom was right: if there’s two things kids like, it’s costumes and candy. And since I still think of myself as a kid, there are two things I like: costumes and candy.

This year I celebrated with a Saturday-night dance party. I went as Olive Hoover from the movie Little Miss Sunshine and had a great time. I have also eaten massive amounts of candy, which has now formed an extra layer of protective padding around my belly.

I’m not entirely unsympathetic to my mom’s plight. Christian culture does a lot to demonize (ha) anything remotely pagan. In the face of peer and liturgical pressure, what’s a believing parent to do? I don’t know. I do wish they had just let us go trick-or-treating. I know I felt pretty awkward and generally dreaded the end of October, especially since we’d usually get pulled out of school for the afternoon of Halloween when there was usually an assembly and whatnot. I mean, most kids don’t mind staying home from school, but on the funnest day of the year? That’s just mean.

Is shutting your kid away from Halloween festivities really going to shield them from the “evils” of paganism? Christmas has deep pagan roots, but you don’t see any Christians boycotting its celebration (for obvious reasons, but it seems kinda double-standardy). Is the adrenaline rush of a kid-friendly “haunted house” constructed in the gymnasium of an elementary school really going to throw a Christian worldview into question, our counteract some fundamental tenet?

Like I said, I don’t know, and in the end all parents are just trying to do the best they can, whether they’re Christian or Pagan. All I know is, I have a lot of Halloweening to make up for, so I’m already thinking about next year’s costume…

My brother and I have this tradition of me buying him t-shirts from Threadless. This I do mostly out of self-interest so my brother doesn’t look like a hobo. Also, I love him, I guess.

Anyway, I like to buy when they have their $10 sales, as they do right now. And when I saw this one, I thought, YES.

It is entitled “BFF.”*

(Check out the product page, with more pictures, here.)

I hesitated because I thought that maybe he wouldn’t actually wear it that much. I knew he’d wear it to Bible college, where he’s in his last year of studies, just to get a rise out of his classmates. But once he graduates and presumably becomes a youth pastor?

I think he’s going to buy it for himself, though. I mean, $10 sale!

*For those of you who are challenged in the arena of pop-culture initialisms, “BFF” stands for “Best Friends Forever.”

So I guess awhile ago I said something about writing in this blog more regularly? Turns out I was full of shit apparently. I’m not entirely sure why I haven’t been writing — I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I’m not feeling particularly theist these days and don’t know how to go about religious discussion bearing that fact.

I haven’t been keeping up with the blogs of those folks you see on the sidebar (and some who aren’t on the sidebar — I do try to stray outside the mutual admiration society every now and again). This has been a mistake, as I see some of you have been making startling, intruiging, thought-provoking posts and hopefully I’ll find it within myself to respond in kind.

Anyway. As you may recall, I’d given up going to church (First Church of Suburbia, herewith known as FCoS) at the start of the summer; I have not returned. I had planned to keep going to the “College and Career” “small group” (it’s not small — it has an average of 15 people). And I had gone… for the first few weeks at least. But I’m done. Now I’m done with both services and Smallies, so I guess I’ve quit church entirely now? I dunno.

The reason I quit Smallies (or, at least, begun a break. Maybe in a few weeks I’ll calm down) is… well, there’s no one reason. But I guess I’m just tired of spending two hours a week being one of two badasses in the group, trying to push boundaries and bring up new ideas and ways of looking at things that don’t involve the usual Christian platitudes and Sunday-School answers. I’m not interested in dealing with a group where thought-provoking discussions are shut down (And where Christianity isn’t a patriarchal religion, apparently).

I don’t really want to get into it too much in detail because a certain amount of confidence should be kept. But I’m sure you can extrapolate.

I know some of you are curious about the outcome of the meeting with the worship leader guy a few weeks back. Well, at the meeting proper I behaved myself (that is, kept the snarky comments to a bare minimum) but also totally chickened out and didn’t say any of the things I was planning on saying, due to the presence of some people who I didn’t really know if I could trust with my oh-so-radical ideas (I guess I’m really more scared of rolled eyes than I realized).

I mentioned in the comments of that last entry that the worship leader is in fact a really awesome guy, and he proved that by emailing me afterward and saying he was open to hearing my actual real thoughts. So, I told him. And gave him a link to this blog. And he didn’t write back for a week, and I thought maybe he was scared off but today he wrote back and was exceedingly cool in his response to everything I said about gender and even the non-theism thing.

Anyway.

I wonder if I should write a letter to the “small” group or something? My brother told me he’d explain my absence, since my frustrations are shared equally by him (the only difference is that he has an actual belief in Jesus to keep him going).

Ugh.