Halloween is our national Mardi Gras. Fantasy-time and Let It All Loose. Get crazy. Get
silly. Get out of the real you and disguise yourself as a mutant turtle or the world's
ugliest human.
All year long we wear masks that hide who we really are. My children see me as a parent
with four eyes (one set's on the back of my head) and superior intelligence. I've got them
convinced that I always know the answers to my questions before I ask them.
For example: "Who left the ice cream melting on the table?"
"What ice cream?" the children chorus.
"You're right," I say. "That's not ice cream any more. That's mutant
amoeba brains."
Wearing masks such as we do, no one has the opportunity to get to know and love The
Real Me. People react to the persons they think we are and therefore fail to meet the
needs of the persons we really are. Masks hide the persons God created us to be. And God
does not make monsters.
"Why are you so cranky today?'' my husband asks me. "You're a real
monster."
"No, I'm not," I growl. "Why don't you open your eyes and see who I
really am!"
My husband throws me a side of bison, raw.
I wear many masks, as we all do. Life is a struggle within self of daring to let out
God's true creation. Then comes Halloween. Last year, Americans spent more than $400
million on costumes. That's up from 1988's $300 million. And which costumes are the most
popular? The characters of horror movies and the occult. We eat, drink and try to be merry
with this stuff to the total amount of $800 million.
"What's the point?" I ask, and a mask of the nation's most idolized
underachiever, Bart Simpson, stares back at me blankly.
What I also don't understand is the parents who dress up their kids like devils, the
very same kids they have been trying to turn into angels all year. Again, what's the
point?
These are also, by the way, the very same kids we take through the neighborhood to
collect mountains of candy. Ever see a five-year-old Mutant Ninja Turtle climbing the
walls on a sugar high?
"Who left the candy on the table where Daddy can get it?" I ask.
"It wasn't mine," the kids chorus from the tops of the curtains.
"You're right," I say. "It's mine!" And that's how Mom goes
trick-or-treating. Oops! My Never-Greedy Mother mask has slipped off, but I quickly shove
it back on by pretending that I'm taking the candy away for their own good, to teach them
a lesson on remembering to put their junk away.
Halloween is the time many of us -- by choice, mind you -- give in to peer pressure and
go crazy, get silly and get dressed up wearing mask over mask. I wonder what God thinks of
Halloween.
And I wonder what's happened to All Saints Day being more important.
