Halloween— a harmless day for fun costumes, tasty treats and good, wholesome fun. False. “Helloween,” as I like to call it, is an evil tradition, perennially deceiving the youth into wicked ways. The holiday we know hasn’t always had such docile roots.
Halloween holds its origins in the Druidic belief that Saman, lord of death, would summon all the wicked souls that were forced to inhabit the bodies of beasts in the previous year. Sounds quaint.
But we think that since we have Westernized the festival, we have purged away any paganish ritual that could corrupt the minds of our youth. On the contrary, we have simply created a mélange of candy corn and iniquity! We send children into cold, dark neighborhoods searching for sweets, disguising themselves as Hermione or Optimus Prime (coincidentally, my last two Halloween costumes). This kind of heinous action is exactly what Saman would have had in mind.
It disgusts me to think that we have associated such a dark day of heathen worship and infidelity with America’s greatest feature: commercialism. You won’t find a more compassionate advocate for manipulative holidays that appeal to America’s shallow materialism than me, but I take a stand when heathenish overtones violate our American values.
The founding fathers of this country would roll over in their graves if they saw our sacrilegious obsession with Halloween. And I’m not just some stick in the mud. I’m always up for a good scare, and trust me, nothing chills me to the bone like the sight of a small child dressed up like a pumpkin.
The fact of the matter is that as an American, I refuse to honor the fiendish, Druidic souls by passing out candy to a couple of preteen girls dressed up like Mario and Luigi.
At Pepperdine, I expect more. There was a reason why George Pepperdine’s favorite verse was not “Freely ye receive candy, freely ye give tricks.”
I suggest that Pepperdine students be trailblazers of a new holiday that coincidentally falls on Oct. 31. Rather than going out to avariciously gather all the molasses sticks we can eat, we travel around the community, removing and destroying any decorations or references to Halloween. Taking down those spider webs in the HAWC — that’s how we stick it to witchcraft.
Halloween is the sole contributor to the decadence and societal degradation of this generation. I’m not going to ignorantly stand by, gaily joining in time of childish amusement, while the morally corrupt incant spells, calling on demonic spirits.
So while most are frolicking through the streets in cheerful revelry, I will be burning all seven seasons of “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” and the “Halloweentown” saga.
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2) There are plenty of biblical literalists on Pepperdine's campus and the Graphic Online has a dedicated "Faith" section. So, this type of archaic thinking based purely on religious fundamentalism is not uncommon at Pepperdine or in the pages of the Graphic.
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