Tag: Halloween

Halloween: “The Safest Day of the Year”

On By Chas S. Clifton2 Comments

Blogger Lenore Skenazy reprints a valuable article looking at the “urban myth” of children being targeted by sexual predators at Halloween.

Paul Stern, a deputy prosecutor in Snohomish County, Wash., agrees [that there is zero evidence for such a belief]. ”People want to protect kids; they want to do the right thing and they make decisions based on what at first glance may make some sense. Sex offenders, costumes, kids — what a bad combination,” he said. ”Unfortunately, those kinds of policies are not always based on any analysis or scientific evidence,” said Stern, who started prosecuting sex offenders who victimized children in 1985.

Read the whole thing.

The Horror! The Horror!

On By Chas S. Clifton1 Comment

At The Witching Hour, Peg surveys some lists of best Halloween films.

For pagan-themed horror films, or those including witches, at any rate, you can’t beat The Wicker Man, The Craft, Practical Magic (Griffin Dunne, 1998), The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), The Devil Rides Out (Terence Fisher, 1968), and The Dunwich Horror (Daniel Haller, 1970).

I would not exactly call Rosemary’s Baby Pagan-with-a-capital-P, but it is still wonderfully chilling as it moves from innocence to realization.

And what about The Call of Cthulhu?

Veronica Lake for Halloween

On By Chas S. Clifton4 Comments

The Australian blog Sexy Witch has featured some promotional materials from the 1942  movie I Married a Witch lately.

It starred Veronica Lake, who filled the “perky petite blonde” slot in several “screwball comedies” of the 1940s, together with banker-turned-actor Fredric March as the descendant of her 17th-century persecutor.  Internet Movie Database has more about it.

I saw it years ago, was thinking along the lines of “Let’s rent it for Halloween,” and discovered that Netflix does not have it.

Apparently I rented it in the 1990s from another mail-order video-rental company that no longer exists, but which had a large library of off-beat, foreign, vintage, and “art” movies.

So we will watch Sullivan’s Travels instead.

UPDATE: “Why You Should Watch Classic Films.”

Today Show Goes Silly on Halloween

On By Chas S. Clifton1 Comment

It’s more than silly to Lenore Skenazy, who calls it the “outrage of the week.”

She is the feisty author and blogger at Free-Range Kids. Anyone who has any contact with kids under 12 ought to be reading her.

Imagine if the Today Show guidelines had been in place when Charles Schulz wrote, “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.” The Peanuts gang would be inside at a “safe” party organized by grown-ups, with various adults warning them about eating too much candy, wearing loose costumes (these can make you trip!) and wearing tight costumes (these can cut off your air supply before you know it and God knows how many kids have died of tight-costumitis!), and everything else, including running, skipping, laughing (you could choke!) and wearing costumes that scare the other kids. Because nothing even the teensiest bit frightening should ever happen to kids at all. Even on Halloween.

I don’t even have kids of my own, but I read her regularly. And I was able to share this with her last month and get a Tweet in return.

It’s Thanksgiving-Put Your Mask On

On By Chas S. Clifton

I have a long-standing interest in masks and masked ritual, going back to when I helped Evan John Jones with Sacred Mask Sacred Dance.

So consider than on the East Coast a century ago, Thanksgiving (or at least the last Thursday in November), rather than Halloween, was the time for masking and trick-or-treating.

Thanksgiving itself was a sort of irregular, off-and-on holiday until it was deliberately fixed to mark the start of the Christmas shopping season during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration.

Organizing Halloween Ritual

On By Chas S. Clifton1 Comment

I said that I was not going to post any more Halloween items. I take that back. Here is one more.

One decision we’ve made is to rebuff curious friends who ask to join our Halloween rituals. It seems like half the people I know want to be pagan on Halloween. I have no problem with a little religious tourism. I’m a bit of a spiritual slut. I have never turned down an invitation to a Seder. Bach thundering through a church transports me. But when I see visions of bacchanals dancing in my nonpagan friends’ heads, I get a little testy. Certain experiences are too comforting, too sacred to be spectacles. For me, Samhain is one of them.

This is what happens when the news media notice you only one week a year.

Free-Range Kids Have a ‘Scary’ Halloween

On By Chas S. Clifton

One last Halloween post, and then I’ll shut up.

Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry speaks truth to power and rejects the nanny state on October 31.

If you want to see something really scary on Halloween, come to my apartment around 9 p.m.I’m letting my kids eat unwrapped candy.

They can eat any homemade goodies they get, too, and that unholy of unholies: candy where the wrapper is slightly torn. And on the very off chance they get an apple, they can gnaw it to the core, so long as there’s not a razor-sized, dripping gash on the side.

There is more. Read the whole thing.

How to Celebrate a Christian Halloween

On By Chas S. Clifton

Writing at First Things, an “interreligious” journal (“inter” as in Catholics and Protestants, maybe), Sally Thomas faces that annual hurdle of the Christian parent: What To Do About Halloween.

How can it be fun and still be doctrinally acceptable? She writes,

Halloween’s emphasis on darkness makes many Christians squeamish, but, to my mind, what my friend observed about the medieval feel of Halloween is more on the money.

I don’t especially encourage my children to dress as scary things for Halloween. We are taught, rightly, to avoid flirting with the occult, and the darkest character any child of mine has ever wanted to be is Darth Vader.

Don’t you love that “flirting”? It’s right up there with “dabbling,” as in “dabbling with witchcraft.”

Ducks dabble. Witches … do other things. But, who knows, maybe “the occult” will kick things up a notch and kiss them back, slip them a little tongue. That Darth Vader costume might be the first step into experiential religion. You never know.

On All Saints’ Day, our parish holds a children’s festival, hugely attended, at which children and adults alike dress as their favorite saints. This year mine will be St. Ursula, St. Walburga, St. Gerard Majella, and St. George. I probably will reprise my last year’s appearance as St. Helena, although the True Cross did keep whacking people every time I turned around.

Watch out for the boy who wants to be St. Sebastian: he’s probably gay.

Via Rod Dreher at BeliefNet, where the commenters actually display a wide variety of opinions about the celebration.

There is always the issue of sex with demons to consider as well.

Fate Magazine Reanimated

On By Chas S. Clifton

When pre-writing the blog post on dining above the dead (something best done while walking the dogs), I was thinking about how it was perfect for Fate magazine.

Digression 1: Dog-walking is not all that meditative, because Something Always Happens, like this morning when they charged off through nine-inch-deep snow to try to catch some wild turkeys.

Digression 2: If the reporter were on the ball, she would re-write her story for Fate or another magazine. Get paid twice for the same work—that is the secret of freelancing.

So it occurred to me, crossing the gully between the county road and my house on Tuesday night pre-bed dog walk, that I had not seen a copy of Fate since last spring. Had it been sucked into the magazine death pool?

I checked the Web site, however, and it promised a new issue soon.

Editor-in-chief Phyllis Galde tells me, “The July/Aug is at the printer, and we will turn around immediately and get the Sept./Oct. one printed.”

She promises an “awesome” new Web site but complained that the Web designer and the printing plant crew were all sick with the flu.

So Fate is reanimated, I hope. I miss it. Where else can you get a good ghost story?

The graphic has nothing to do with the magazine. Just some Halloween cheer. You can get it on a T-shirt.