But I don’t think that’s similar actually. In our city there was a controversy about the St Patrick’s Day parade. The city moved it to a weekday from the tradition of weekend near actual St P’s day to undercut the relatively newer tradition of bar crawling (and lots of public disturbance complaints) associated with the parade. The private parade organization protested this change to weekday and just stopped having the parade altogether. The bar crawl event lived on, though seems to be gradually petering out.
Anyway both these cases are categorically different IMO than Christmas related ones because though Halloween and St Patrick’s Day also have Christian origins the modern celebrations are pretty much 100% detached from those origins. With Christmas the really controversial part is the remaining Christian aspect: people who see traditional public sponsored celebration of that holiday as ‘Christianity being shoved down our throats’, v those who see it as their valued tradition under attack.
Both Christians and non/post/anti-Christians might agree in objecting to the consumerist/materialist aspect of Christmas the secular holiday. What they are at odds over is Christmas the religious holiday and how that relates to govt, or perhaps by extension to private companies which provide ‘public accommodation’*. Religion is not a real factor in debates about public aspect of Halloween or St Paddy’s.
*on further thought, OP’s option 2, people wanting govt to prohibit private companies’ creation of ‘a hostile environment for non-Christians’ via religiously oriented Christmas displays in privately owned places of public accommodation like stores, restaurants, hotels etc. is not that far fetched. The ‘Overton window’ might not have opened that far yet, but it moves pretty fast now.
It’s different in some ways, and similar in others. Yes, the way Christmas is celebrated has more of a religious association than Halloween or St Patrick’s day celebrations, but there are limitations to what a city can do with Halloween/St Patrick’s day celebrations - they can change the date of the parade , but that doesn’t necessarily mean that anything will change regarding bar crawls or trick-or-treating or anything else that requires no government involvement and those same limitations apply to Christmas. The government can remove Christmas from the list of legal holidays , require its employees to work on Christmas, open public schools on Christmas - but realistically, even in that world, the government is not going to prohibit private businesses from decorating or even giving their employees time off for Christmas, much less prohibit homeowners from decorating their homes any more than they will legally prohibit trick or treating on Thursday October 31st.
How is promoting a Halloween-themed activity analogous to banning anything?
Isn’t the alternative not setting a date at all and having it be a jumble of people deciding on different dates? Every community in my area always sets a date, because otherwise, it would end up being several nights long. (It has to be the 31st, that’s tradition. No no, the 30th, that’s the real tradition. But it can’t be on a school night, the kids will come in hopped up on sugar! But it has to be on a school night so kids are off the streets early. And back when daylight savings ended in October, that was a long debate too.)
it’s the changing from Sunday to Saturday that is analogous.
Maybe where you live - but I’m sure there are plenty of places where the local government does not set a date for trick-or-treating and it just happens on October 31. I’m kind of wondering how it can become “several nights long”- after all, just because a group of parents chooses to trick or treat the Sat before (or after) Halloween doesn’t mean I’m obligated to answer my door and give out candy on that day.
Since when does Halloween have Christian origins? Last I checked, it was originally celebrated by druids. All Saints Day was created by the Catholic Church in response.
I don’t really see how. There are plenty of Christmas season activities for a whole month before Christmas, so how is having a Halloween season activity a day before Halloween equivalent to banning Halloween? (Halloween’s season is obviously shorter than the Christmas season, but the 30th is still part of it, I think.)
I’m sure it would settle into a single custom eventually, but which one? You might set out to give out candy on the 31st, but what if all of your neighbors had arrived at doing it on the 30th?
Hm, so that whole October 30th thing is a more bizarrely local issue than I had realized, and it’s all because of a party that hasn’t been held since 1954. People are weird.
There’s nothing wrong with having a Halloween activity a day before -parties and parades and such are often the weekend before - but that’s not nearly the same as the government decreeing which day a non- organized event should occur. It would be like the government deciding that Valentine’s day will be celebrated on the nearest weekend.
That wouldn’t be the government (or any organization) changing the date of Halloween , or decreeing that trick or treating will be on the 30th.
Some Christians do object to that. But some of the ‘there’s a war on Christmas!!1111!!!11’ people are objecting to ‘happy holidays’ instead of ‘merry Christmas’ as a greeting specifically in stores during the season; and/or to displays of items for sale and advertisement for such not, in their opinion, concentrating enough on specifically Christian imagery. In other words, they’re insisting that the consumerist/materialistic aspect should be explicitly religious; which strikes me as exactly the opposite of objecting to the commercialization of the holiday.
I grew up in southwest/west-central Ohio and I’m used to the idea of local governments setting what we called “Beggar’s Night” as opposed to Halloween. It just makes sense to me to have that done.
In this case I don’t see this as an external authority telling the common people what to do. It’s the case of the people using the Democrat system to make a rational decision together.
You could make the same point about Christmas, claiming it’s really just a pagan solstice festival co-opted by Christianity, and it would be equally pedantic.
For practical purposes for centuries, the entire West celebrated All Saints and Christmas as Christian religious holidays with no knowledge on the part of 99%+ of individuals that either was anything other than a Christian religious holiday, whether or not either was ‘really’ a pagan holiday co-opted by ‘the Catholic Church’*.
Then much more recently, last no more than century or so, Halloween became virtually 100% secular. Christmas isn’t nearly 100% secular, though has a big secular component. How do we know Christmas is nowhere near 100% secular? Because of all the cultural-political brawls about public sponsorship of the religious celebration of Christmas (nativity scenes, Christmas carols with explicitly religious lyrics in school concerts, etc, etc). That’s what people fight about, that’s the only plausible origin of a ‘ban’ on Christmas from 1) publicly sponsored celebration or 2) less likely right now but not so far fetched eventually: telling stores, restaurants etc they can’t ‘insult’ and ‘create a hostile environment’ for anti-Christians with religious displays or 3) telling private individuals they can’t put up religious Christmas displays, the last of those being the one clearly unconstitutional in the US, but not every poster is from the US.
*it’s historical opinion that All Saints was aimed at replacing the pagan Festival of the Dead not a clear fact. It also may have existed for centuries before it was made official in the 9th century. In any case it’s irrelevant to the point here either way.
I find that claiming ‘they’ are ‘hypocrites’ in the Culture Wars has such an inherent glass house/stones problem that I try to stay away from it.
Yeah lots of people are inconsistent on all sides of all kinds of issues, or at least they can somewhat plausibly painted that way by people on the other side of the issue, to an audience of like minded people on the underlying issue…
I still think my simple point is obvious. Christian and non/post/anti-Christians might agree about consumerist/materialist extremes of secular Christmas celebration. That’s not what they are fighting about. They are fighting about religious symbols in govt and ‘public accommodation’ private spaces.
As far as ‘Happy Holidays’ which is only one corner of that debate (again stuff like nativity scenes, protests about religious carol lyrics in school concerts, there are many aspects to it), somebody has been pressing over recent decades for that greeting to replace ‘Merry Christmas’. The signs and cards aren’t changing themselves, there is some human-driven reason. And the reason is, I believe fairly obviously, a belief by some that specific mention of Christmas is exclusionary and prejudicial because of the religious implication. If the holiday had no religious content (‘it’s really an old pagan solstice festival last I checked!’ if that were in any way actually relevant ) nobody would care.
Back to ‘hypocrites’, I’m not sure that it’s ‘inconsistent’ to object to Happy Holidays replacing Merry Christmas unless you first put on a hair shirt and give up all consumerism/materialism including giving to others. I think you can have various opinions about HH* and degrees of materialism/consumerism without any given combination being automatically ‘inconsistent’ to any greater degree than every day ‘inconsistency’ of virtually everybody, at least in some other people’s opinion.
I’m from NY where Jewish people’s objections to MC spawned HH decades ago; HH v MC in the broad US nowadays is mainly post/anti-Christians of Christian heritage v practicing or at least cultural non-practicing Christians so a bit different argument. IME US Muslims, Hindu’s, Buddhists etc overwhelmingly don’t give a shit, even if their feelings are often invoked by post/anti-Christian people of European Christian heritage. Anyway as a NY’er I grew up with HH. I find it insipid, would feel idiotic saying it and I never do. I say Happy Hanukkah to people I know are Jewish, MC to known Christians, nothing to people known to be of other religions because they don’t have a major holiday that time of year, nothing to people I don’t know, ‘you too’ etc. to people who say HH first. It’s obnoxious IMO to answer HH with a passive-aggressive toned MC. But again HH/MC is a small part of the quite non-imaginary cultural struggle over Christmas.
What I’m finding even worse is the recent trend (at least locally, in Eastern Ventura County) in trying to comingle Halloween celebrations and decorations with Dia Del Muerte decorations and practices. I don’t understand how that Mexican tradition observed near the solstice got rescheduled to a month after the equinox and I tend to suspect (with irritation) either unbridled capitalists being culturally insensitive yet trying to cash in on the similarity of icons or pushy Christians ignorantly trying to move the pagan practice farther away from the date of their coopted Christian celebration.
–G!
Ah well. In the end I’m just being a grumpy old man.
How do you calculate that it was observed near the solstice? This page lists the Great Feast of the Dead (preceded by the Little Feast of the Dead) on August 12-August 31st (Wikipedia has it Aug 1-Aug. 20). Is anybody claiming that one has anything to do with Halloween (or Christianity)?
How is promoting a Halloween-themed activity analogous to banning anything?
