HALOWEEN REVISITED

The Texas branch of the Blackmore family were all dressed up for action tonight and from what we hear, had a great time mixing with families throughout the neighborhood.

Here on Long Island, we spent a couple of hours with dozens of kids from our church at Fun4All, the huge indoor play center in Port Jefferson Station.

Halloween has presented issues for Christian families for years and now that our consumer society has blown it up into the second biggest spending event of the year (after Christmas) and the word "holiday" has actually been attached to it, it may be time to work out some way to live comfortably with this annual festival of costumes, dress and enough candy to sink the Titanic.

Though I may be accused of naivete and over-simplification, I think there are probably three levels to Halloween -

1. There's a whole Satanic thing that goes on at this time of the year, in dark places and away from public gaze.

2. There's a whole role playing, costume thing that glamorizes horror, blood, death and darkness.

3. There's a fun few hours when young children dress up as princesses, pirates or comic book heroes and collect candy from generous neighbors under the watchful scrutiny of their parents.

While #3 could lead to #2 and in turn #2 could become #1, that is not necessarily the way things progress.

We each choose what we do about Halloween, if anything ... and if you choose #3 I think that's a good way to go.