Happy October! Yellow leaves decorate the sidewalks, the air has a bite, and PSLs are a bit more acceptable. It’s the best month of the best season.
Now that it’s officially fall, I’m starting to see people decorate for Halloween. Chicagoans do not back down. The Halloween decorations remind me why I love living so close to my neighbors—lawn after lawn after lawn has skeletons, spiderwebs, and pumpkins. We collectively love this time of year.
Yet, this year, as I walk around neighborhoods, I’m finding the Halloween decor funny and a bit jarring. Tombstones transform front yards into graveyards, skeletons sit in the front porch rocking chairs, a sign on the front door says “we’re not here, we’re dead.” Most of it’s not gory. It’s cute, it’s amusing, and it’s about as morbid as American culture gets. And I think that’s a good thing.
Christians have a lot of thoughts on Halloween. I respect the different ways people approach it—we can each do what sits right for our own conscience. As for me, it’s one of my favorite holidays (tied with New Year’s Eve). I love it for the chance to dress up, use excessive pumpkins, and have parties with friends. Halloween is my mom’s birthday, so growing up it was always a time of fun parties and crazy decor. I indulge in the scary aspect a little less, but it does give me an excuse to go to a haunted house or watch the one scary movie I can stand (looking at you, A Quiet Place).
Yet, the “we’re not here, we’re dead” sign jarred me more than anything has in year’s past, because, to put it frankly, one day that will be true. We are all dying. While Halloween can be a way to downplay mortality, it’s also a very real way our culture engages in the realities of death. We make jokes about it. We entertain its presence from afar.
In a culture used to ignoring death, Halloween decor feels out of place. It’s a little too on the nose and self-aware. It allows us to look at the darker sides of this world at a caliber we can take in—in little doses. Life doesn’t last forever, and before we know it, we too will be the skeletons in the rockers. We will have our own gravestones.
Even I, as a Christian—whose beliefs center around the death of Christ, a future resurrection, and eternal life—don’t like writing those words. Facing death is scary, and to be honest with you, I don’t want to do it. It’s heavy and heartbreaking. Despite having a future hope, death is not the way it’s supposed to be. Death’s reality looms over us all, yet its impact is surprisingly personal and complicated. There’s a good reason we’d rather ignore it.
But maybe, maybe, American culture’s mockery of death is a hopeful way of dealing with it, too. Yes, we could use a bit more genuine grieving and therapy and honor for our aging bodies. But perhaps our kitschy decor and plastic tombstones echo 1 Corinthians 15:55, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”
Maybe mockery is a right response to an enemy that’s been defeated? Maybe taking it lightly is a way of dampening its power and mitigating its reach? Maybe we can laugh at death because its days are numbered and its effects are temporary?
While death mocks us even still, one day the roles will be reversed. In light of Christ’s resurrection, they already are.
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