Christian Consumers
Fall is upon us and Halloween is just around the corner. Here in the U.S. we’re good little Christian consumers so the three calendar events that most empty our wallets are Christmas, Easter, and Halloween. An interesting thing that God pointed out to me is that Christmas and Easter are kind of like Iceland and Greenland, in that they’re kind of the opposite of what they advertise themselves to be.
See, Christmas tells us it’s about the birth of Christ, yet it was designed by the early Christians as a replacement for the Winter Solstice celebrations. Now they’ll tell you that that fits because it’s about the days starting to get longer so it’s about the rebirth of the sun, but really it’s a marking of the low point of the year, with regards to the sun, so it’s an observance of the death of the sun.
Easter, on the other hand, is supposed to be about the death of Christ. Again, they try to mix you up and tell you it’s about him rising from the dead, but zombie stories aside, it’s his death on the cross that we really focus on. But, like all good Christian holidays, this was designed to let the newly minted Christians still have parties and celebrations when they always did as your basic pagans, this case being the celebration of Spring, when all the world seems to be bursting with new life.
Halloween, however, has no pretensions about it. It’s about death and death it’s about. Oh they’ll pay lip service to it being about getting ready for All Soul’s Day on November first, if you really push them, but mostly they don’t shy away from good old ghoulies and ghosties. So start practicing your zombie shuffle, or your Hungarian accent and get ready for another year’s whistling past the graveyard.
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