Consider the logistics of putting a winter coat on a dinosaur. The arms are already a design catastrophe. The tail has become a structural problem. Somewhere inside the polyester, a child sweats with the indignation of someone whose father suggested the Cretaceous period required mittens.
This is Halloween in Montana: natural selection, supervised by parents carrying extra gloves.
I love the whole ridiculous enterprise. The porch lights. The visible breath. The negotiations over candy, conducted with the moral flexibility of international arms dealers. Three peppermints for a Reese’s? Somebody should notify the authorities.
Then comes the warning that Halloween opens the door to the demonic.
I respect the concern. I struggle to see hell’s strategic advantage when a small dinosaur acquires a Kit Kat.
Still, underneath the laughter lies a question worth asking: whose night is this?
Halloween means All Hallows’ Eve, October 31, the doorstep of All Saints’ Day. On November 1, the Church celebrates the saints in heavenly glory; on November 2, All Souls’ Day, she prays for the faithful departed undergoing purification. We enter November remembering both the glory God promises and our continuing need for mercy.
Samhain existed, and some folk customs may carry pre-Christian influences. Scholars dispute how extensive those connections are; the evidence does not support the tidy story of a pagan festival simply stolen and relabeled. The Christian name and vigil, the tangled folk traditions, and the modern inflatable skeleton aisle deserve separate drawers.
History clears the porch. Now look through the door.
The Church is about to announce that death has failed to keep its prisoners forever.
St. Ephrem the Syrian understood the dramatic possibilities. In his Nisibene Hymns, Death boasts about its captives, then discovers that the dead man entering its kingdom undoes the whole operation. Christ speaks; graves open; the tyrant starts negotiating.
I love that. Death has prepared an intimidating speech, and Jesus is already taking the doors off.
Ephrem knew what death did to families. His audacity came from believing that the crucified Christ had entered the place nobody could escape and broken its claim to permanent ownership.
That is room enough for Christian laughter. A skeleton can become a ridiculous lawn ornament because bones do not have ultimate authority over the human story. We can mock monsters without pretending that everything monstrous is imaginary.
God and Satan are not rival candidates awaiting election results. Satan is a fallen creature. He cannot run against the One who created him.
But here I have to stop smiling for a moment.
Abuse happens. Addiction empties chairs at supper. Betrayal can make a familiar house feel uninhabitable. War buries children. Despair can speak in a person’s own voice.
None of that is funny.
The Church rejects divination, conjuring the dead, and recourse to demonic powers. A costume is not automatically occult participation; neither does October make spiritual recklessness harmless. Content and intention matter. Catholics who conscientiously leave the porch light off deserve charity, not a lecture from a man holding fun-size chocolate.
Our laughter belongs at the expense of evil’s imperial ambitions, never its wounded.
And fatherhood has taught me how easily those wounds could become mine.
I can manage a coat zipper. I cannot arrange a life without suffering for anyone I love. I know the inward inventory: enough patience, enough listening, enough tenderness? What did I miss while I was busy being useful?
The helplessness frightens me. Loving children means discovering how much of your heart can live beyond your reach.
I need a Savior considerably more powerful than a vigilant father.
So when Halloween brings me to the threshold of All Saints, I am grateful beyond my ability to be dignified about it.
There are people on the other side of that threshold.
Catholics ask the saints to pray for them because they are living members of Christ’s Body. Their intercession depends entirely upon him, the one mediator; every grace they have is his gift. Asking their help extends the family habit of asking one another to pray. Death has not canceled their membership.
I think of Josephine Bakhita, kidnapped into slavery, brutalized, eventually freed, baptized, and welcomed into religious life. She spent decades serving as a cook, sacristan, and doorkeeper, meeting people with a gentleness her tormentors had not managed to destroy.
When I ask her prayers, I am asking someone who knows what human cruelty costs. Her holiness does not make her suffering small. It reveals how much more God could make of her life than her captors intended.
The frightened father has company. So does the exhausted mother, the anxious teenager, the widow eating alone. The Church is larger than the people we can count from the back pew.
I imagine discovering, after a long, miserable struggle, that the stadium has been full the entire time, everyone leaning forward, praying.
Every face turned toward Christ.
Then my mind returns to the kitchen table.
Candy wrappers. The quiet after the doorbell. Those little costumes eventually folded away, the plastic pumpkins retired, the children growing beyond the sizes I somehow still expect them to wear.
What undoes me is how ordinary it all seemed.
A hand finding mine. The request for one more house. A porch light.
I could be impatient inside for a moment, and I would later give almost anything to enter again.
Tonight I want to receive what is here: the cold air coming through the door, the child waiting on the step, the small extravagance of giving something sweet to someone who has done nothing to earn it.
And I want to remember who waits beyond this little evening.
The Church can enter November with her head lifted because she knows who has gone before her. The saints are alive in Christ. Their prayers accompany us. Somewhere beyond our sight is a family whose love has been made more generous, not less, by its nearness to God.
There will still be hospital rooms, temptations, terrible phone calls. I will still reach for people I cannot keep safe. But the grave will not become their rightful owner. The risen Jesus has already entered its darkness, and Death, in Ephrem’s magnificent telling, has had to watch its captives leave.
Let the children laugh under the porch lights. Let the church prepare its feast. I will carry the gloves and follow, grateful that Christ has made even this dark road lead somewhere death cannot command.
Halloween belongs to the man who left the tomb.
