Ecclesiastes 8:15

Seriously, what's not to love here?

My Dutch Calvinist preacher/grandfather would have found something, I'm sure. But then his generation of believers was far more confident about the pervasive "powers of darkness," even though he likely never met a witch, even of the Halloween variety.

I didn't trick-or-treat as a boy. 'Twas verboten. What's more, I was an obliging child: if Mom and Dad made it clear that children of the light didn't march up and down the streets like children of darkness, I didn't pout, or, as the Dutch would say, zannik. I didn't go.

But, soon enough, neither did I stay home. The truth is, my earliest memories of Halloween are, well, just slightly naughty. I'd pilfer a bar of soap and take off. Then, after meeting up with a couple more naughty boys, we'd set about soaping windows, sometimes at random, sometime with intent. My earliest memories of Halloween are prank-filled, some of those pranks being a little dirty, some dangerous, some just plain pranks. I don't remember ever being transformed as a ghoul or goblin or witch, then coming home with a sack full of candy. Naughty sure, but never a witch. 

Just look at her. Isn't she a doll? She's my granddaughter, set for the gala evening's coven.

In the Christian school I attended, we weren't even to whisper the word Halloween because the October 31 holiday belonged to the Reformation and those theses nailed to the door, fluttering in the Wittenburg wind. Did you know there were holes in Luther's cassock from his determined effort to ascend a couple thousand church steps on his knees and thereby, through sheer persistence and hard work, earn his own salvation? You know the story--saved by grace alone. October 31 belonged to Luther and Calvin and John Knox, belonged to God--not Satan.

But today things are a little more complicated, a little more muddied. That witch's costume doesn't mean our granddaughter's loving parents have handed her over to the Devil. Here she is, dressed for a holiday day-care party at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church. 

(Just in case, like me, you're not acquainted with Roman Catholic saints, our precious granddaughter is dressed as St. Gianna Beretta Molla, a 20th century Italian who chose life for her child and death for herself when the only way for her to remain alive was to abort the child.)

It's perfectly clear that our granddaughter is still a bit too young for Luther, too young also too young to have much to say about St. Gianna's pregnancy, too young to understand that bright orange skirt or the floppy pointed hat of her witch's garb. And, thank goodness, she's too young to even think about stealing a bar of soap from the bathroom like her grandpa did, then attacking neighbors' windows.

She's still too young to say "Halloween." What she will understand, however, is that tonight that purple plastic pail will fill with treats, many of which could well be verboten any other night of the year, but tonight--"yeah, sure, have another--Halloween happens only once a year."

What we all know--her great-great-grandfather the Dominie, his slightly disapproving children (my parents), her Grandpa and Grandma Schaap (my wife and I), and her parents too is that soon enough she'll learn about the mess we call history, about "here-I-stand" theologies, and the real powers of darkness.

That day'll come soon enough, this grandpa says. Tonight, eat, drink, and be merry.

That's biblical too. Look it up.