Halloween or Hallowe’en, also known as All Hallows’ Eve is a yearly holiday observed around the world on October 31, the eve of the Western Christian feast of All Hallows. According to some scholars, All Hallows’ Eve was originally influenced by western European harvest festivals and festivals of the dead with possible pagan roots, particularly the Celtic Samhain. Others maintain that it originated independently of Samhain, and has Christian roots. – Wikipedia
We have always enjoyed Halloween. The neighborhoods we grew up in were family-oriented and safe for kids to run all over the place. Many of the houses had acreage so kids could not trick-or-treat at 100 houses in a single night…but that was OK because they gave out some pretty big candy bars so we made out like bandits.
As adults living in other neighborhoods we saw things had changed. We had to be very careful about where our children trick-or-treated. The night before Halloween around Detroit was called “Devils Night” and traditionally fires were set all across the city. We thought all big cities had the same problem but we sadly came to realize that only Detroit tried to burn itself down.
Today Halloween is changing. Communities and churches run programs to allow kids to trick-or-treat in a safe area like a church parking lot instead of going house-to-house. Meanwhile, adults are embracing the holiday so much that Halloween is one of the most popular holidays on the calendar.
I remember homes decorated with pumpkins, corn stalks and the occasional sheet hung on a tree to look like a ghost. Today it would seem that some folks go a little over the top. We were traveling through the countryside the other day and came upon a house that was really into the holiday…so we stopped and took some pictures.
Personally I would not send my kids to the door of this house.
