I hand out candy every year so the little hooligans in my neighbourhood don’t firebomb my house or poison my dogs. I’d be much happier if their parents would take them to church that night.
My grandparents’ Mennonite church has some sort of “trick or trunk” thing where they all stand around in the parking lot and give kids CANDY from their trunks.
Churches like candy too, yo.
Okay, Lutheran Asst. Minister here, chiming in with “That is indeed fucked up.” Did you read the “reason” for corrupting Halloween?
Yeah, only one person was smiling at that house: Pastor Paul, with a sadistic grin.
Do you really have to get freaked out by Halloween? Even the Puritans, of all people, had a saying (dubious cite: U2 quoted it from the stage during their ‘Zooropa’ tour-- they’d been getting flak for the over-the-top fake commercialism of the tour): “Mock the devil and he will flee from you.”
So, Christian parents, let your kids dress up like witches or zombies or Mittens.
It’s called Fun – try it.
I’ll bet it’s “Trunk or Treat” - my church has had those. There’s never been any pretending that it isn’t a Halloween party. And they always avoid scheduling it during the town’s trick-or-treat times. It can be nice for families who live where there isn’t much of a “neighborhood.” Trick-or-treating in the suburbs is great, but where I live, walking the neighborhood would take a healthy adult several hours. And you have to be prepared to jump the ditch to stay out of the way of trucks and combines. It’s not ideal for a kid in a monkey costume with impaired peripheral vision from the mask.
We did have one year where a particularly prim person was running the party, and she told all the volunteers doing “trunks” that they had to dress as Bible characters. Some good friends of ours told her that was fine. They’d come as David and Bathsheba, when they met. She backed off. 
Is this some kind of terrible pun?
The really stupid part is that Halloween isn’t satanic in any way. It’s freakin’ Samhain dressed up as a secular holiday, and due to early Christian syncretism, given (get this) a Christian name. (All Hallows’ Eve) in anticipation of All Hallows(saints) Day on Nov. 1.
Jack o’Lanterns, pranks, costumes, etc… are all old Celtic stuff that predates Christianity.
My elementary school had costume parades as part of our Halloween festivities. With witches and ghosts and demons. On school time. But we were Catholics and had invented the holiday, so it was okay.
ETA: Fuck Samhain. I said we invented it and I’m stickin’ to it. 
One crazy lady in my nieghborhood tried passing out mini-bibles one year.
Judging by all the TP and egg on her lawn the next day; I’m gonna say she should NOT have done that.
I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want my kids anywhere near Jesus’s ween. There’s enough church scandals out there already.
Dudes. Halloween= All Hallows Eve, aka the eve of All Saints day. It’s been a Christian holiday since the fucking sixth century.
I will agree that renaming it “Jesusween” is silly and ridiculous.
You may be correct. Since All Hallow’s Eve came about around 600AD, we know almost nothing of pagan history for sure before that. In fact the earliest written celtic writings of any length come from aroudn that period. No doubt, some of the trappings of Samhain were pilfered for the pagans, just like for Christmas and Easter.
Maybe, but there’s no record of this. The Book of Leinster dates from c. 1100, but Pope Gregory regularized the celebration in 835, some 300 years earlier.
Most of what we think are ancient Celtic rituals comes from such sources as Frazer’s Golden Bough dating from 1890.
It sounds great to me. More kids off the streets and in church = more candy for me.
But it’s a Roman Catholic holiday! The folks freaked out by Halloween find paganism & popery equally distasteful…
(Then they switch to complaining about the War on Christmas–when their spiritual ancestors were the Puritans who forbade celebrating the holiday.
The modern stuff we do may or may not date back that far, but it’s pretty likely that the date of All Hallows Eve and All Saints Day were chosen to coincide with Autumn / Harvest festivals. Just about every other Christian holiday is chosen to coincide with other major pagan holidays and festivals (Easter, Christmas, etc…), and a lot of the old pagan stuff was co-opted to represent Christian things.
For example, eating ham at Christmas is an old Norse custom, and Dec. 25th may have been the date celebrated as the birthday of Mithras in ancient Rome.
It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if some of the things we do at Halloween are indeed pre-Christian pagan things, and considering what a sort of odd man out Halloween is relative to the other Christian holidays, I think it’s kind of likely.
Apparently some public schools have been scaling back Halloween observances because of complaints coming from a variety of different directions (all of them entertaining):
Drop the Halloween Mask! It Might Scare Someone
Umm, no. Well, yes, sorta for Easter as after all, the Last Super was a Passover feast, thus Easter Sunday was originally calculated like Passover.
We have extensively and comprehensively debunked the myth that the ancient Christians picked dec 25th due to pagan holidays (it had more to due with numerology and it being nine months after the Annunciation) , and we also have debunked that Saturnalia was dec 25th (dec 21 more often). Roman Mitraism came AFTER Christianity, if anything they cadged from the Christians. And it wasn’t on the 25th either (well, maybe sometimes as the Roman calendar was crazy). Nor was Yule. Yule is on the Solstice.
Now, yes, Christian holidays often pick up the trappings of pagan or folk customs. Yule logs , Christmas trees. But from what we can tell, Jack o lanterns were supposed to represent souls in Purgatory. There is no evidence that Samhain was a holiday associated with the dead in any way.
FALL-O-JESUS?
Who hasn’t? 
Um, if by “a bunch” you mean, “The OP of this thread,” then you might be on to something. Chill out.
As to the OP, let me chime in with most of the other people who say, what’s the big deal. People who don’t celebrate Halloween the way you want to are doing something wrong? Not everybody does things the same way as you. We live in a diverse world, and will sometimes find ourselves in the minority when it comes to cultural practices. Get over it.
WTF? In your mind, these people’s only choice is to go inside and and turn off the lights, they should not be permitted to do anything else?
Now if they started protesting your jack o’lantern display that would be one thing, but I don’t see how their fall festival inhibits your ability to enjoy halloween.
It’s this kind of intolerance of other people’s different ideas that built up al Queada.