“This is Halloween, this is Halloween
Halloween, Halloween, Halloween, Halloween
Halloween, Halloween
Tender lumplings everywhere
Life's no fun without a good scare
That's our job, but we're not mean
In our town of Halloween.”
-Danny Elfman-
Photo by Steven Van Elk on Unsplash
Now, you may be rolling your eyes or thinking, of course these two would have an article about Halloween in HearthKeepers; or you may be ready to straight up leave. I would challenge you to see the principle behind the practical here, because while Halloween may not be a big deal to you, or might even offend you, there are things here that you can apply to the holidays you do love – personal, religious, or cultural.
One doesn’t have to hang out around our families for long before you realize that we enjoy spooky things. Without even trying, meaning not specifically attempting to influence my nieces, several of them have proudly shown me the skulls they bought, the potion and poison bottles they made, had witch-themed birthday parties, and asked for creepy things for their birthdays. We grew up with the fun of a good scare.[1] Picking out, making, and creating costumes is something I still enjoy to this day.
But can Halloween be fruitful?
Yes, and let me tell you why.
Being fruitful is being beneficial, growing, flourishing. Halloween can be all those things.
How? Let’s talk.
Community: Halloween is a cultural holiday. There is a time and place for the joint celebration of things, for coming together with your broader community as citizens of a city, state, or nation. There is a fruitfulness in having shared memories and experiences. Joining in on the fun is a good way to connect with your neighbors, the person working the cash register, librarians, and more. Fruitfulness has a community aspect to it, and Halloween is a great way to connect with your community. There are still neighborhoods out there that go all-in on eerie décor, haunted houses, and trick-or-treating. If that is not your neighborhood, find one nearby that is. Make this a fruitful holiday by blessing your community or enjoying the generosity of others. Consider reaching out to your neighbors to see what you could do to make your own street more fun on October 31. Like all women, take what you have and make it something more.
Stories: Stories are a big part of creating a culture and rooting a community. Shared experiences tie your children together, bring in the single and the lonely, and spark conversation and debate. Watching movies like The Nightmare Before Christmas, Hocus Pocus, The Nightmare on Elm Street, shows like Over the Garden Wall, reading books like The Halloween Tree and Something Wicked this Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz, and listening to the podcast Lore are great ways to curate that shared experience. Make it an experience. Shut off the lights and light the candles. Put on some musical ambiance[2]. Read the stories out loud in a soft and sober voice. Gather everyone on the couch and snuggle in close until the monster jumps out and fills the room with screams. Or go big! Suggest a casual joint reading of a scary book with several friends. Host an Over the Garden Wall party. Watch an old silent film like Phantom of the Opera and engage in some improv dubbing. Look for those who don’t have family and invite them in. Create traditions, homemakers. This is the joy of all holidays. Create traditions.
Feasts: There is nothing as obviously fruitful as food. We are taking paper or plastic money and turning it into nourishment. Feasting is important. There has never been a culture since the dawn of time that didn’t have feast days, often potlucks. Whole communities come together in celebration of home, safety, harvest, and blessings. Halloween is a great time to get creative with feasting. Dry Ice can give us that spooky fog. Dramatic colors like purples, green, orange, and black are so much fun to play with. Silly things like gummy worms and eyeballs are a must. You can lean into the gentle side with pumpkins and leaves or go straight for the skull muffin and candy molds. Get the kids engaged. Make extra and leave goody bags in the mailboxes on your street or on doorsteps. Bless others with little feasts or join others to create a big feast.
Crafts: Check out your libraries and thrift stores for the October Issues of old magazines. Get out your scissors and glue and start crafting cards, postcards, collages, and seasonal art for the walls. Send the cards to grandparents, aunts and uncles, or just faraway friends. You can print off pages for the kids to color and brighten the day of a childless friend, housebound senior, or someone who is sick. Stock up on orange, black, purple, and green yarn and thread. Look for Halloween-themed patterns on fabrics. Get some paint to paint pumpkins or just get pumpkins to carve. (Offer them to your local chicken farmer on November 1.) Incorporating crafts into our holiday celebrations is a great way to make the holiday fruitful. It enhances the mood of the holiday, gives us things to decorate with, allows us to repurpose and reuse, gives kids things they can add to the celebration, and we can give them away to bless those around us. This is all fruitful. We have taken a few things and turned them into many things to bless us and bless others.
Horror Doesn’t Win: One of the undercurrent messages of Halloween is a snubbing of horror, death, and darkness. Instead of allowing it to sit in the dark corner filling us with dread, we drag it out into the light and laugh at it. This is how we deal with boggarts, right? We picture them as funny instead of what scares us the most. This is Halloween. Halloween is planting our feet and saying darkness, horror, and evil doesn’t win. It is an extremely tangible, tactile exaggeration of the idea that the horrors persist, but so do we. We carve scary pumpkins and then put lights in them. Children dress up as monsters, and we give them candy. Instead of retreating inside when the sun goes down, we go out into the night together.[3] Life can be truly horrific, macabre, and scary. This holiday lets us find our courage by making it fun, festive, and silly. More soberly, if that is your bent, this holiday is also a great way to practice a bit of memento mori. It can be a time of sober reflection that helps you focus on what is important in life, like your people. This too is fruitful.
Is it possible to have a sterile Halloween? Yes. Obviously, the first way we can create sterility on this day is by not celebrating. But that is an easy answer and one that is dangerously close to lording over other people’s conscience and piling on false guilt. There are plenty of good reasons not to celebrate Halloween. Look for harvest parties, Reformation Day celebrations, seasonal movies to participate in instead. There are also seasons of life where holidays just can’t be hosted or attended.[4] We aren’t in control, and everyone’s lives are different. Let’s dig deeper than what seems to be the obvious answer.
I think we can make it a sterile holiday by trying to do too much. If we try to do everything we possibly could do – haunted houses, all the décor, extravagant costumes, all the crafts, all the food, all the trick-or-treating – we can move right out of fruitfulness and into an immoderate glut of overconsumption and waste. It’s like taking the fruitfulness of feasting and feasting every day. You’re no longer feasting; you’re a glutton. Remember that temperance is a virtue. Also remember that what is temperate for you might not be temperate for others. Keep your eyes on your own fruitfulness.
As much as I hate to say this, I think we can make it unfruitful by overextending the celebration. Yes, I love autumn and Halloween, but I don’t start my celebration in July. We don’t have four months of Halloween; that steals its fruitfulness because it steals its significance.[5] Now, that doesn’t mean you don’t have a day in July where you pretend it’s Halloween. That can be fun and a great reminder that the heat doesn’t win. That is fruitful. Just don’t overdo it, or you will lose the magic. Anticipation is a huge part of the magic.
Another area we can lose our fruitfulness is by going it alone. Being fruitful is sharing abundance. Holidays aren’t meant to be celebrated alone. Sure, parts of them can be solo, like everyone’s different levels of horror tolerance may lead one person to watch their horror alone, or their cheese alone, or read their favorite books alone; but we can’t allow that aspect of the celebration to turn into total disconnection, isolation, only engaging online, or going places where no one knows you so you don’t have to connect. To be fruitful is to engage with your immediate community – family, neighbors, church, etc. – accepting both the joy of this and the accountability.
Holidays are fruitful and Halloween is no exception. They are a day that we turn into feasting, memories, connectedness, and generational rootedness. Your efforts to make this day significant—either simply or (appropriately) extravagantly—are fruitful because it nourishes our people to have cultural connections and happy memories. The traditions we make are passed down to the next generation and the next and the next with each generation and each off shoot of the family adding their own twist. Suddenly, we see the tree, limbs heavy with fruit that has grown from the trunk of our fruitfulness. What a glorious and ordinary thing!
[1] Not the fun of torture-porn. The fun of a jump-scare, the slightly off feeling of a good shiver, monster movies, and cheesy horror that makes you laugh. I will admit that most everyone in our families have a bit of a dark sense of humor.
[2] Of Shivering Leaves and Cozy Fires
[3] Do not get me started on the time change. The time used to change before Halloween. Do you understand that we robbed ourselves of the significance of facing the dark with laughter when we pushed it back to after Halloween?
[4] Looking at you Fourth of July of 2026.
[5] Please remember that the reason places like Hobby Lobby get their holiday things out early is because they’re a craft store. If you plan on crafting gifts for something like Christmas, you need them to have Christmas stuff out in July so you can get started.
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