Chapter 1: A Halloween Rant

When I was growing up as a little girl in Pittsburgh, I loved Halloween. It was a time to dress up silly, go around the neighborhood collecting candy, and have fun at a party or two. Sure there were the mandatory scary costumes and movies, but that’s all they were - movies and costumes. Nobody I knew took it any more serious than that, let alone view it with any religious connotations. That was then...

As a college senior my biggest activities outside of school revolved around working with the youth at my local church. Although the church didn’t adhere to my specific brand of religion (I was raised Presbyterian), it worked for me. Most of the kids I worked with were between twelve and fifteen, boys and girls. Naturally being it was church I dealt mostly with the girls and it never ceased to amaze me how even in your stereotypical WASP church in middle-America, kids still had issues that their parents might never believe - or even want to know about. Think just because your fourteen year-old daughter goes to church, gets good grades, and dresses like a Disney princess means she doesn’t have problems? Yeah right ... Think again. Teen pregnancy, STDs, molestation, and just plain sexual curiosity are just as much a part of their lives as any other kid - maybe even more thanks to be little cocoon you’ve wrapped round them.

Admittedly, the really major ticket items - STD, pregnancy, etc., have been few and far between. The biggest issues I have personally had to deal with mostly center around a parent’s inability to address the sexually-related questions and changes every teen girl has as she grow up. Although I’d been warned abut such things, I was still amazed the first time a girl asked me about her period. My god, why didn’t her mom tell her anything about it? Birth control? Well, I guess some mothers figure if they don’t talk about it then it won’t happen. Yeah, right. What’s worse moms - telling your daughter about birth control or letting her get pregnant? She’s going to have sex whether you like it or not so why not protect her as best you can?

Pardon my rant but it helps explain my issue with Halloween at the church where I helped. Someone managed to convince the holier-than-thou masses Halloween is based on some pagan ritual and as such exploits our children by convincing them satanic ritualism is OK. What a line of BS! Nonetheless, these politically-correct fear-mongers have managed to eliminate the traditional Halloween in favor of what they call “Harvest Festival”. All brought to you by the same hypocrites who complained when the Pittsburgh city council rebranded the Christmas Season as “Sparkle Season”.

In any case, so now instead of dressing up like goblins and witches, the dress code requires something “nice” like a princess or action hero. No ghosts or other harbingers of the apocalypse. The party still retains most of the trappings of the usual party - apple bobbing, pin-the-tail, and such but heaven forbid anyone mention anything involving a straw broom or rattles in the dark. No haunted houses but we did have a “Holiday Farm House”. Don’t even ask me about it!

Oh well, at least the kids will grow up to be wonderful human beings with high self-esteem and family values. (If you believe that, I have some good swamp land to sell you!)