Halloween 2021 – Facts and Nonsense

Halloween is not a Pagan Holiday

Saw a great article today about Halloween’s origins and whether it is a pagan holiday or not. The article is by Tim O’Neill over at History For Atheists. Here’s a link: https://historyforatheists.com/2021/10/is-halloween-pagan/

He goes into a lot more detail than I do in the blog posts I wrote back in 2013 (which need some heavy, heavy editing). Great to see that someone else came to the same conclusion that it is not a pagan holiday, nor was it ‘stolen’ from pagans.

I do still contend that a few games and traditions like bobbing for apples were ‘pagan’ in origin. Individual practices don’t particularly matter as cultural and religious borrowing happens all the time.

Social Media Urban Myths

I haven’t seen much in the way of nonsense being passed around on social media this month. Granted, I quit with Twitter and Facebook last year because of all the COVID-19 articles being passed around. I do still check Instagram but nothing to report there.

If anyone sees one, let me know, I’ll pick it apart.

The Usual Suspects

Poked around chick.com to see if they’d managed to update their infamous article on Halloween. They have not. They’re still using The Two Babylons as their primary source, and some books published back in the 1960’s. They don’t have anything new except one article from 2020 complaining how Halloween was canceled due to COVID-19. I’m not totally sure how that’s true as we had Trick-Or-Treating in my apartment complex. I guess mass gatherings were cancelled so the church “Trunk or Treat” events were not really a thing.

It does look like Bill Schnoebelen has a Halloween DVD for sale. Found it for rent on Vimeo for $3.99. I’ll probably do a review of it.

So far it’s a pretty quiet year on the ‘Halloween is the Devil’s Birthday’ front.