Kid in Witches costumeOctober 31
Saints of the Day...and Events

 

Halloween, All Hallow's Eve:

    Spooky, kooky, creepy, and fun! Halloween is the time of ghosts, goblins, gravestones and graveyards. Of spooks and spirits and silly-fun tricks. Of witches and warlocks and scary black cats. And candy corn, jelly apples, pumpkins and bats... haunted houses, the Jack-o-lantern, trick-or-treating...
    But be careful!... in may places Halloween is a feast of the occult, of evil, of the devil...

    In Christianity, the tree feasts of the After-Death:
      1- Halloween, All Hallow's Eve, on Oct.31... the Vigil of the Solemnity of All Saints and the feast of Death and Hell...
        2- All Saints, on Nov.1... the Solemnity of All Saints in Heaven
        3- All Souls, on Nov.2... the special feast to pray for those in Purgatory

     Halloween for a Christian:

   "Halloween" is a Christian name, it means "the eve of All Saints", All Hallow Even, eventually All Hallow's Eve, Hallowe'en, and then - Halloween.
    The original names were the Samhein of the Celts and Pomona Day of the Romans

    Halloween for a Christian is a very happy holyday, the eve or the vigil of the Solemnity of All Saints, as December 24th is the eve or vigil of the Solemnity of Christmas on the 25th. It is to celebrate the day of each Christian who died in the Lord and is now in eternal Heaven as a Saint, the feast of your dear one who died in Jesus Christ, your father or mother or spouse or child or friend...
    The day we celebrate the Canonized Saints is the day they died, but there are millions and millions in eternal Heaven, and the Church celebrates all of them together on All Saints, that's why it is a most joyful Solemnity.

    On the other side, Halloween is a very serious day: The day to remember that we have to die... we all know this fact, but actually we often live as we never have to die... well, this a special day to remember it... if we live as we have to die we will be more generous, with less vanity. St. Augustine says that w have lots of problem in this life because God does not want us to get in love with it... we are made to go to eternal Heaven, and the whole universe we know compared with Heaven is like a drop of water compared with the ocean.

    A third fact to remember this day is that Hell exists, and for you or for me!... everyone alive today will go either to eternal Hell or to eternal Heaven, and that's a Biblical fact, a revelation of God.    Grim Reaper

    Death-Heaven-Hell-Purgatory-Last Judgment   Hell Art Gallery   Death

 

   Story of Halloween:

    The story of Halloween goes back over 2000 years to the ancient Celts. Druidic priests regarded the day as the end of the year. Not only was it their day for celebrating the year's harvest, but October 31 itself was also the day of Samhain, the Celtic New Year, a festival for honoring the dead. In order to appease the wandering spirits they believed roamed at night, the Celtic priests made fires in which they burned sacrifices, made charms, and cast spells.
    Some accounts tell of how the Celts would burn someone at the stake who was thought to have already been possessed, as sort of a lesson to the spirits, (Panati). Other accounts of Celtic history debunk these stories as myth, (Gahagan).    
    During the first century the Romans invaded Britain. They brought with them many of their festivals and customs. One of these was the festival know as Pomona Day, named for their goddess of fruits and gardens. They adopted the Celtic practices as their own. But in the first century AD, they abandoned any practice of sacrificing of humans in favor of burning effigies.
    Portions of the Celtic holiday of the dead eventually passed into Christian culture after the Romans conquered the Celts and tried to bring the Celts into the "Christian fold." It eventually became apparent to the church leaders that the Celts, in spite of their conformation to some aspects of Christian culture, were stubbornly sticking with elements of their old religion. 
    So, in the seventh century AD, the church moved its All Saints' Day, a Solemnity holiday for honoring early Christian martyrs, from a day in May to November 1, thus associating it with the old Druid death rituals of October 31. By the tenth century A.D., the Catholic Church had added a new holiday, All Souls' Day to pry for those in Purgatory.
    But the spread of Christianity did not make people forget their early customs. On the eve of All Hallows, Oct. 31, people continued to celebrate the festivals of Samhain and Pomona Day. Over the years the customs from all these holidays mixed. October 31st became known as All Hallow Even, eventually All Hallow's Eve, Hallowe'en, and then - Halloween.
    Celebration of Halloween came to America with early Irish and Scottish immigrants. By then, though, it had already started to lose its mysterious overtones and was becoming merely a harvest celebration: a night of bobbing for apples, eating popcorn, and telling ghost stories around a bonfire. It was already changing into the holiday for children with which we in the 20th century are so familiar.

    The Jack-o-lantern is the festival light for Halloween and is the ancient symbol of a damned soul.
    The Irish used turnips as their "Jack's lanterns" originally. But when the immigrants came to America, they found that pumpkins were far more plentiful than turnips. So the Jack-O-Lantern in America was a hollowed-out pumpkin, lit with an ember.

    Pumpkins were cut with faces representing demons and was originally intended to frighten away evil spirits. It was said that if a demon or such were to encounter something as fiendish looking as themselves that they'd run away in terror, thus sparing the houses dwellers from the ravages of dark entities. They would have been carried around the village boundaries or left outside the home to burn through the night.

    Bats, owls and other nocturnal animals, also popular symbols of Halloween, were originally feared because people believed that these creatures could communicate with the spirits of the dead

    Witches and witchcraft are dominant themes of the holiday. Witches generally believe themselves to be followers of an ancient religion, which goes back far beyond Christianity, and which is properly called 'wicca'. Witches are really just one side of a  modern revival of paganism - the following of pre-Christian nature religions, the attempt to return to worshipping ancient Norse, Greek or Celtic gods and goddesses.

    To witches, Halloween is a festival of the dead, and represents the "end and the beginning of the witches year. It marks the beginning of the death and destruction associated with winter. At this time the power of the underworld is unleashed, and spirits are supposedly freed to roam about the earth; it is considered the best time to contact spirits"
    The apostle Paul said Witchcraft is one of the acts of the sinful nature and those who practice it will not inherit the kingdom of God (Galatians 5:16-21; see also Revelation 22:15).

    Black cats have religious origins as well. Black cats were considered to be reincarnated beings with the ability to divine the future. During the Middle Ages it was believed that witches could turn themselves into black cats. Thus when such a cat was seen, it was considered to be a witch in disguise.

    Various activities traditional to Halloween are mostly associated with the idea of obtaining good fortune and foretelling the future.

    The custom of trick-or-treating is thought to have originated not with the Irish Celts, but with a ninth-century European custom called souling. On November 2, All Souls Day, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for "soul cakes," made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. At the time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for a time after death, and that prayer, even by strangers, could expedite a soul's passage to heaven

    As believers, we are called to "Test everything. Hold on to the good. Avoid every kind of evil. [1 Thessalonians 5:21-22] Who can deny that virtually all of the symbols of Halloween are evil? Witches, monsters, ogres, vampires, ghosts, ghouls, goblins, devils and demons all portray evil.
    Christians are to "... have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them." [Ephesians 5:11]

    Halloween is part of our heritage, the culture we grew up in. It's not really seen as a religious thing anymore. Never was, really, by Americans, at least. It started out that way in Europe, and a lot of things associated with Halloween–the occult themes, the Jack-o-lanterns, the costumes, the trick-or-treating, the giving of candy–all of these seem to have their origins in occult rituals of the past, many going back to the ancient Celts in Great Britain.

    However, it is for many today a celebration of the occult and evil, most specially in the famous Parade in the Village in New York City.

     Many people in our culture simply do not take the occult seriously. It strikes me it may be that we spend one evening a year going out of our way making light of the occult, and that might have something to do with it. So you ask people about Satan and they say, "That's the guy with the red tights and the pitchfork, right?" They don't want to realize that Satan is a real, powerful spiritual force that makes a difference in the lives of people and in the lives of nations every single day. It's hard to take the devil seriously when we picture him this way. So a celebration of Halloween in that fashion I think makes light of the occult, and when that happens people take lightly a very serious and dangerous thing.

    So, for many, Halloween is not a Christian celebration but a pagan holiday. Christians should not celebrate Halloween this way because it is wrong to participate in something that is used for evil or has evil connected to it. Christians should celebrate as the great feast it is, the eve or vigil of the Solemnity of All Saints.

    May God help each Christian to see Halloween as a grand opportunity for the Gospel, rather than something to be feared. May He also keep Christians from those Halloween customs which clearly go against His Word.
 

http://wilstar.net/hallown2.htm
http://www.holidays.net/halloween/
http://www.tigerx.com/holidays/halloween.htm
http://www.allhallowseve.com/
http://www.str.org/free/commentaries/life/hallowee.htm
Heaven-Hell-Purgatory-Last Judgment
The Occult  Wicca
http://www.jeremiahproject.com/culture/halloween.html
http://users.rcn.com/tlclcms/canhallo.htm
http://www.hauntedhouses.us/
http://www.halloween.com/
 

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