Shark in the water! Right? Is...is that a shark?

My kids are watching Jaws 3 again and they are laughing their heads off. There's totally a severed head and everything in that movie. It's all la-ti-da  "isn't a lovely day at Sea World" and then all hell breaks loose.

Anyhoo, that's not what I should be writing about. I mean...about which I would be writing. (groan) I thought my next blog would be part 2 of the series-in-my-head on the lasting impacts of divorce, and I will get to that. 

Ha. Here's the part where they just saw the baby shark and are trying to keep it in the park. They're so excited about what this could mean for the park. They're going to make a spectacle of the thing...

My blog description says:

"Observational humor and social commentary

 from a Catholic mom on parenting, social politics,

relationships, and swimming upstream." 

Most of the time I'm all la-ti-da my kids say funny things, and isn't life full of poignant lessons, and here's some stuff I've learned because I'm over 40 and if I don't write it down, I'll forget it.

But the divorce thing is really the first social issue I attempted to write about. It's also the subject that got me my first "hide post" and even a "hide all posts." It's reasonable to suspect that if you put something out there, not everyone's going to like it. I can try to write about a touchy subject as carefully as possible, but someone's still not going to like it. I'm going to have to be okay with that. I've said it before, this blog is open because I appreciate that something I have written or experienced might resonate with other people and ultimately let them know they're not alone.

Oooh they moved the shark from the holding tank to a display tank... the shark's health is still precarious, so that was really dangerous, and oop- look, it died in front of everyone. The poor marine biologist resigns to let those evil media folk photograph her prize, now gone...

Hot-button issues wasted no time at all in overtaking social media. Social sites quickly became not just a place for family and friends to share news and photos, but a place to express an expanding universe of politics and philosophy. I have two teenagers. My oldest is 18, and is basically part of a "flagship" generation on social media. Over the course of her teenage years, we have watched an eruption of media sites. There's no stopping it; it's been my job to set expectations for my teens' activities on these sites. Their online behavior (that I have seen) has been, for the most part, perfectly within reasonable limits.

Here's the hard part. I don't always know what they read. I can't always tell who they follow. I can't 100% control what they're exposed to. (um,..to what they are exposed?) I don't drive myself crazy trying to limit screen time. I expect them to come when I call, get their chores done, respond the the "real" world before the online world and other we-live-here-in-our-real-life, not just on-the-internet ideas. All I can do is try and model how they should respond. Sometimes I'm pretty good at that. Not so much other times.

Wait wait just a sec.. the shark's mother is inside the park!?! oh holy night what now... Are they going to try and catch that one too? No wait- I think they just go straight for the kill...

I got super duper mad at my oldest a couple of days ago. She tweeted a note she had written and I went ballistic. We did a terrible job communicating with each other about what made me so upset. I huffed.  She shut down. She didn't want to talk to me, She didn't want to discuss the issue. We resorted to messages. I begged her to read articles I had picked, without considering her sensibilities. She sent me an I-will-not-be-responding-to-this note. My temper got shorter and she got further away- even though she was only in her room.

Oh haha- that little girl sees the mama shark and tells her dad to look at the cute little fishie...

We were at a stand off for about a half-day. Then, a local Catholic university called her back and reported to her that she's qualified for a ton of scholarships. Turns out they really want Catholic High School grads who want to major in Theology.

uhh...

Oh yeah. That's what she wants to do.

um...

  

Holy carp (intended)-

there is no shark here to kill us. It's a little fish, not a shark.

I congratulated her, but our unresolved issues made it strange. We had to fix things. I changed my tone. I sent her another article that struck kind of a middle ground, and she changed her tone. I sent her another note asking her to help me with a do-over. We both realize that while we have different opinions on the gravity of the matter about which she tweeted, we don't have to see a shark. We can see a fish. 

Sometimes people need a do-over. I can't control what kind of do-over they think they need.

Her tweet was about a do-over, and I am posting it with her permission:

I really don't like the f-word. I don't like the "accept it or f-off" tone. I don't fall comfortably into using the pro-noun "she."

But seriously. That's all I don't like in this tweet.

I'm not going to presume that she can completely understand why those things make me uncomfortable. I did not ask her to take down the tweet or change it in anyway. We spent some time talking about how "accept it or f-off" is uncharitable to some groups of people, and applauded by others. We talked about how our consciences are all still in formation. We talked about how forming our consciences with reputable resources that cover all angles of an issue is necessary. I suggested that maybe part of her calling to Catholic Ministry would be to help navigate these relatively uncharted waters in a pastoral way.

Oh hang on-they blew up the mother shark. My 12-year old is laughing her bloody head off.

After wading through it all, I was happy when we settled into a dialogue about mercy. It is a skill to operate from a point of mercy. I believe that mercy is the only thing that can connect people who cannot or will not agree about something.

Mercy Definition

dictionary.search.yahoo.com

n. noun

• 1. Compassionate treatment, especially of those under one's power; clemency.
• 2. A disposition to be kind and forgiving. a heart full of mercy.
• 3. Something for which to be thankful; a blessing. It was a mercy that no one was hurt.

I'm not going to comment much on Caitlyn. I didn't know Bruce. I know my daughter, and I care about her formation of conscience. She's 18, and I may not be the official responsible party for her formation anymore, but my behavior is still a model for her all the time. I take that pretty seriously. She is on the edge of making an impact on the world I cannot predict, and the best thing I can do with any touchy issue is to make sure she knows what the official Catholic teachings are, and then teach her about mercy by the way I act and the way I treat others, both here in our real life and on the internet. I started to get a little passive aggressive about Caitlyn on Facebook, and I initially chimed in a little here and there, but I deleted and "unliked" a few things that sent messages in a less than compassionate way. I'm not going to view this as "apologizing" for my perspectives. It's not. I know what my perspective is, and it's just not needed out there today. Besides, I linked in Fr. Leo's post because I feel it resonates well with how I feel right now anyway.

The first thing I saw when I read her tweet was a shark. I went straight for the kill. I missed. We almost created a situation that could have caused a lot more damage than it did. That phone call came in at the just the right time. I asked for a do-over. She gave me one. No blood in the water. 

There's so much that can be said about the use of this quote, but seriously I can't do everything for you.

P.s This post exposes my daughter's perspective. Don't comment negatively about her.  Believe me, I will not be inclined to be a cute little fish about it. I'll be, you know, the other thing. (as nicely as I can)

Marrying into a Divorce: Part 1

A few years ago, a friend of mine found out she was expecting her third child. She was 41 and her next youngest child was 11 or 12.  Her oldest was 16. Among her many concerns about this pregnancy, was that she feared people would think she was...

that she was...

(divorced.)

She's not. I empathized with her, and found myself observing the dread she showed at the prospect that someone might think she was divorced. It was obviously very dear to her that she wanted nothing to do with the culture of divorce. Her logic made sense, as it would be quite common today for moms or dads with a particularly large age gap between children to have "traded in" their first spouses. That's a quote from another mom with a large age gap between her kids, who once boasted to me that she traded in her husband for an upgraded new model. I laughed instinctively (awkward), but I sure hope she doesn't talk like that in front of her older child- you know, the one with the substandard dad. cuz oh haha.

A little over four years ago, I was pregnant with my fourth child, and there was a seven year age gap between him and my third child. I remembered my friend's fear that people might think she was divorced. I wasn't overly concerned about what strangers might think of my family.

I was, however, in the company of juuuuuuust about no one else. The reality for me was that many of the moms I can think of with large age gaps between children really do have those large age gaps because of a divorce. Among the moms I know around my age who have both an 18 year old and a four year old, I am the unicorn.

mmmmm......... not funny. I really dislike divorce "humor" *

And speaking of unicorns, let's talk about divorce.
(sorry, I just couldn't think of a better segue.)

My mom was really good at planting anti-divorce wisdom into my head while I was a teenager. She didn't call it that, but that's what it was. My parents have been married for 44 years. They've maybe had more bumpy years than not, and our childhoods were far from idyllic. But the message they sent was that families stick together, though thick and thin. She would say things like "You can love a lot of people, but you can marry only one." She taught me about the bonds of shared memories. She would remind me that getting married in the Catholic Church gave us sacramental grace, which would carry us through the hard times. She taught me that getting an annulment in the the Catholic Church was never a guarantee, can take several years, if granted at all, and that those facts are not weaknesses of Church Law, but rather serve as a both deterrent from divorcing and a message that the sacrament is taken very seriously. She encouraged long engagements and big weddings. (Turns out big weddings often correlate with good marriages.) Living together before marriage would never have been tolerated, as it increases the chances for divorce. (It used to. It still might.) I never planned on marrying outside my faith for many reasons, one of which was that I had experienced first hand the steep price our family paid when my parents did. For me, as a second child and classic rule follower, if my mom said something would increase the risk of divorce, I paid attention. I had no intention whatsoever of ever getting divorced.

My parents were not really intrusive when it came to dating, but they did expect to at least be informed about who we were seeing, and would expect to see them at our dinner table regularly at some point. (If that didn't scare them off, not much would.)

My mother warned me, when I told her I was dating someone whose parents were divorced, that I should proceed with caution. (This was not a personal remark about my future husband's personality; this was, in her view, simply a fact.) She mentioned divorces tend to "run in families." (They kind of can. But a couple's choices can overcome this.) Being 19, in love, and sure I knew everything, I was unfazed. I simply quipped that each of his parents were re-married and had been for maybe 13-14 years each at the time or so, and I joked that at least they both "got it right the second time around." haha. (Obviously I had not developed my disdain for divorce humor yet.)
"Uh-huh," mom said, "and so what does that tell you about the realities he's grown up with?"
"I don't follow you."
"That the first time around is when you get it wrong, and that the first time isn't the only time."
"oh." That did give me pause.

Little did I know, that was the tip of an iceberg I would not more fully encounter for years.

“Divorce can be deceptive — legally it is a single event but psychologically it is a chain, sometimes a never ending chain, of events, relocations and radically shifting relationships strung through time, a process that forever changes the lives of people involved.” 
--Judith Wallerstein, Adult Children of Divorce Researcher


I didn't discover Judith Wallerstein's work until I needed to. She passed away at the age of 90, and was still writing a column for the Huffington Post on divorce and its permanent impacts on children. Specifically, her research and studies focused on how divorces impact the life-course trajectories for people whose parents had divorced as children. She began her unprecedented study in 1971, in the earlier years of the divorce tidal wave that swept the USA between the late 60s and early 80s.


Here's an excellent summary of her findings. Suffice to say, Dr. Wallerstein did NOT conclude that a divorce was a short-term event to be absorbed with a child's presumed "resilience," which was and still is sometimes, a prevailing thought.

In 1972, Dr. Wallerstein documented a conversation she had with Dr. Margaret Mead, a famous cultural anthropologist. Dr. Mead said to her: "Judy, there is no society in the world where people have stayed married without enormous community pressure to do so, and I don't think anybody can predict what you will find."

Right now, my plan is to write two more posts eventually, about how I am literally married into a divorce. My husband's emotional well being is a priority for me, and while I have at times been inundated with stories from both sets of his parents about his upbringing, surprise surprise, they don't really have the whole story about his feelings. After nearly 20 years of marriage, he's divulged enough to me about his perspective as a child of divorce that explains so much about his basic wiring. Some of this didn't click for me until very recently. Turns out you really can learn new things about your husband after 20 years!

This will not be a series about either of those noted researchers I mentioned earlier.

This will not be a series about whether I think any couple should or should not get divorced. (Not my circus, not my monkeys. I have my own, thanks.)

This is a series about how a 35 year old divorce still impacts my life, my husband's life, and our children's lives, and how my family still makes adjustments. 

Next up: Guess what? If I ask the Googles for advice in juggling two sets of in-laws, I get NOTHING. (I'm sure there's another circus joke in there somewhere.)  So I'll write my own.
After that I think I'll write about that "enormous community pressure" Dr. Mead referenced. I just find that statement both fascinating and of paramount importance. Stay tuned!








*Someecard used with permission

Holy Week, Hole-y Week

Holy Week.

This week, for Catholics and some Protestant denominations, our Facebook newsfeeds might be filled memes and messages about Holy Week, the most solemn and celebrated time of year for Christians. It starts with Palm Sunday, when we recall Jesus' entrance into Jerusalem. Monday through Wednesday consist of preparations and rehearsals for Thursday through Sunday's events. In my family, depending on the calendar, Holy Week sometimes also contains an enormous traditional Passover dinner. The long one. And everything is kosher. Because Holy Week just isn't busy enough.

The Holy Week "Triduum," three days of prayer and preparation, begins on Holy Thursday; we go to Mass and recall Christ's Last Supper.

On Good Friday we attend the Stations of the Cross in the afternoon. Our kids participate in a "living stations" event, where they re-enact the stations in live vignettes.

(these are not my kids)

Later that day, we also attend a solemn church service commemorating the Passion and crucifixion of Christ in the evening.

Then, Holy Saturday is....what, universal egg coloring day?

Well, it kind of is.

There isn't really anything "specific" for Holy Saturday. We try to get some of the cousins together to color and have a few cute traditions with the eggs. There's a lot of boiling and dye prep, and then the kids are all done in 18 seconds. (My husband is usually the last one at the table, perfecting his Star Wars egg or whatever.) Later we make sure we have all our last minute goodies for baskets, brunch, and Easter outfits. And then we run to Target to buy tights or nylons because we forgot them AGAIN.

Sometimes people go the Easter Vigil on Saturday night, which is a looooong but very beautiful Mass. The Vigil is a special time for those who are completing their official initiation sacraments to join the Catholic Church, and it's an especially joyous thing to witness. My two daughters and I are all part of the music ministry at our church, and we often sing at several Masses or other services during Holy Week.

So, with all this attention drawn to a few days in the year, every year, you'd think I might actually avoid scheduling conflicting major events for just these few days, right?

Uh, nope! Many of our traditions are flying the coop this year, because my daughter is actually having knee surgery on Good Friday, and that sort of blows some holes in the plans.

(Nudge nudge, get it? HOLE-y week??)
ba dum dum

So, Hole-y Week.

I have spent most of the last couple of weeks coordinating with doctors, insurance people, physical therapists, pre-op nurses, surgery schedulers, and more insurance people, all because I didn't really look at a calendar.

Almost two months ago, Anna dislocated her knee. We've used the word "dislocated" so often since then, that when my 4-year old was playing with his doctor kit a couple of days ago, his patient's complaint was that he had "a cold, a fever, and a dislocated back." He said it correctly.

Anyhoo, several consultations and MRI's later, it was decided that she needed surgery to repair the damage. I was to wait for the surgery scheduler to call and inform me when the doctor's first available surgical appointment was. We were hoping it would have been done during Spring Break, but that week was fast approaching, and I still hadn't gotten "the call." By the time we finally got a call for an opening, we just wanted the earliest slot possible.

ring ring
"We have Friday, April 3."
"That's the earliest you have?"
"Yes. I can put you on a cancellation list to see if an earlier slot opens up, but most likely, you're looking at April 3."
"We'll take it."
click

It took a few days for the "oh, wait...Is April 3 Good Friday?"
Why yes. yes, it is.

uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.................

so then, "oh, wait..." became "Oh well!"

I gave very little thought to re-scheduling. Instead, we're just taking a break from the normal levels of busy for this time of year.

Most years, I sing in our church choir for several services between Thursday and Sunday. Sometimes one or both of the girls sing as well. My two middle children attend a youth group at a different parish, and they have their live stations with their peers there. I usually take the other two kids and go watch that. There's often a lot to juggle between Thursday and Sunday. And Passover starts on Good Friday this year, too.

While I believe service is critical to developing our faith, we can lose a little of the beauty of the season when we are so caught up in each day's logistics. This year, that's just not an issue. We're going to do what we can, and not worry about being at everything. Anna and her dad and I will spend Friday in the hospital. Our two middle kids will still be in their live stations, but without their parents watching in the congregation. We're fortunate to have a lot of family around us, and we have various plans for relatives to watch our three other kids, take them to their events, and color eggs with them. On Saturday night, instead of Friday, we'll try (maybe) to squeeze in a super-shortened 30-minute version of the Passover Seder (the one we never do). The soup will come from a boxed mix. (An audible gasp would come from my mom just now. She'll understand, maybe, this year.) On Sunday, Easter baskets will be simpler, outfits will be more casual, and I don't really care about nylons or tights. I didn't decorate the house much, I don't have cute Easter nails or hair or a new dress. And fortunately, it will still be Easter.

If I had remembered that April 3 was Good Friday, would I still have scheduled her surgery? Probably not. But I did, and now I'm grateful it turned out this way. It might be a little silly to extrapolate a bunch of super deep meaning on the timing of this little outpatient surgery. I just wanted my kid to feel better as soon as possible, you know? Anna's a little nervous for Friday, but she'll be so happy to be done with it. She knows she'll be on the road to restoration after Friday, and we will very literally have quite a happy Easter this year.

Fortunately, this is true whether I wear nylons or not. Whew.

I'm Catholic. Oh yeah, and also I'm Jewish.

First, some exposition:

My parents got married when they were 19 and 20 years old. They had six children: four girls and two boys, in that order. I am the second daughter. My siblings and I went to Catholic schools for all of our elementary and junior high school years. For most of our childhood, we looked like a big stereotypical Catholic family.

But.

If things had gone a different way, a very long time ago, things might have been different for us. Like, really different. Sooooo different.

My older sister sometimes jokes about being baptized at the "Church of the Kitchen Sink." We were talking about this the other day, and she couldn't remember if she has any kind of baptismal certificate anywhere, or if there's just church documentation that my maternal grandmother baptized her. There was no medical emergency, and that's only one of the reasons the sink baptism was not something our grandmother was technically allowed to do. My sister's sink baptism, in Catholic terms, was valid (it still "counts") but illicit (not in "legal" form). I am only thirteen months younger than my older sister, and we're not sure if I had a sink baptism or not. Knowing our grandmother, she very well may have done it and never told anyone, but we'll never know. There are pictures of my older sister and I as toddlers at what my sister says is my church baptism, and I do have a baptismal certificate somewhere. I can't remember the date on it, but I think I was about a year and a half old. That's actually was pretty old for a Catholic infant baptism in my family, so it would have taken something pretty major to hold up my baptism for over a year. While there are many details about this time in my family's life I will never know, I do know what the main reason was for the delay in my baptism, which is also the same reason our grandmother decided to baptize my sister in the sink.

It's because we're Jewish.

Since before our parents were married, religious conflict in our extended family would be a constant in our lives in one way or another. Over forty years later, whether we know it or not, we're all still "paying" in varying degrees for the fallout.

Here are the basics:

1. My father was raised Jewish.
2. My mother was raised Catholic.
3. My mother made an Orthodox Jewish conversion.
4. My parents were married.
5. Their first daughter was born a little over a year later, and she had a Jewish naming ceremony.
6. My maternal grandmother decided to baptize my sister.
7. I was born.
8. My mother returned to the Catholic Church. (The sequence of #7 and #8 events are pretty much a guess here.)
9. The rest of our siblings were born, and each had Catholic infant baptisms in a Catholic church.
10. My father converted to Catholicism. (He does NOT consider himself a "completed" Jew. He finds that idea very offensive.)

I know very little about the specifics of my mom's initial conversion. Someday, I hope to know more. I was not even aware that she'd formally converted to Judaism until some time after I was married, years ago.

I have early memories of lighting Hanukkah candles when I was maybe three or four, and I remember telling friends that my father was Jewish when I was in Kindergarten and first grade at a Catholic school. It was normal to me. In that time period, I don't remember self-identifying as either Jewish or Catholic. I imagine that's pretty standard for a 5 or 6 year old.

We stopped lighting Hanukkah candles at some point. I can't explain why, we just did. I remember when my dad was baptized into the Catholic church. I was in second grade at a Catholic school, and he had his First Communion the same day I had mine.

I'm going to skip a couple of dozen years now, because there is simply too much in my head to continue on a chronological path. I might write more someday about the winding religious paths my parents took, but I don't even know where to begin. For now, I figure I'll just start with how I have managed to come to terms with my own identity.

Because my mother had a formal Orthodox conversion to Judaism before marrying my dad, I am Jewish. It's the state of my birth, and no matter what religion I practice, I will always "be" Jewish. The same is true for my siblings, and the same is true for my children. A rabbi once told us that the fact that we practice Catholicism simply makes us "away from the flock." Being Jewish is more like a nationality; we're citizens whether we observe any form of the Jewish faith or not. Nonetheless, we're still in a little bit of a pickle. I have already had my Dark Night of the Soul about it. It's weird to have had one foot in each of two fairly incompatible worlds. Despite the early tug of war for  our religious practices, our Jewish citizenship remains.

My two grandmothers were products of faiths and cultures with long histories and deeply held principles. My Catholic grandmother was desperate to baptize my sister, and maybe me, because she truly believed our souls were in danger. I know less about what my Jewish grandmother may have felt desperate about, but seeing us baptized was not part of the plan as she knew it at all. I imagine that if things had gone the way she thought they would at the time of my parents' wedding, things would be very, very different; we would be unquestionably, undeniably Jewish by both nationality and practice.

I am proud to be Catholic for many reasons, one of which is that unlike so many Evangelical Christians, the Catholic Church does NOT seek to convert the Jewish people, and we do not (any longer) pray for their conversion. I'm glad the Catholic Church has the willingness to reflect and correct past wrongs and misunderstandings, even if it takes a while. For the record, it's not okay to baptize Jewish babies outside of a parent's permission, even if it is a medical emergency.

My own children share a Jewish heritage because of mine, and we all practice Catholicism. We attend Mass weekly, and have spent many years in Catholic schools, although we do not attend exclusively Catholic schooling now. We also light Hanukkah candles and we celebrate Passover most every year. We do a "real" Passover, and not a "Christianized" Passover, which has become quite popular in some Christian communities. I've been to the "Christianized" version, and while I understand the point, that interpretation makes me a little uncomfortable. That's for another post, too. 

My youngest son in the same baptismal gown all my children have worn. 

This is my sister's Seder plate all loaded up for Passover. Sometimes we have up to 40 people at our Seders.

Now, my mother is the head of the religion department at a local Catholic high school, where my oldest daughter attends school. She and my dad attend Mass weekly. She also takes Hebrew classes at a local synagogue, and sometimes she talks about taking out a membership. We'll see if she ever does it. My dad jokes that even if my mother insists, he'll never keep Kosher again. (He says he converted for the bacon.)

 And so long story short, that's why I had a "late" baptism, why my sister was baptized in a kitchen sink, and why my mom makes an incredible matzoh ball soup.



 

An Overcooked Halloween Stew

If you're anything like me, Halloween starts sometime in late September, when the kids start asking about costumes and when the zombie baby stores start resurrecting in empty store pads.

I absolutely hate zombie babies. (I know. I said I don't really hate anything. But I hate zombie babies.)

My husband would transform our house into a haunted maze if he could, and for years and years and years and years he has talked about wanting to open a real haunted house corn maze thing for reals. I vacillate between encouraging him to go ahead and try to make that a reality and just doing the uh-huh-can-you-go-find-the-plastic-pumpkins thing.

He has a couple of pretty scary ghoul things that I make him take to work because I find them too gruesome. He has also collected a couple of borderline scary pirate skeleton gadgets that talk on motion sensor, and are kind of funny, unless you are a two- or three-year old who is both fascinated and repulsed by said gadgets. One of the pirate skeleton heads goads you along and croaks- "closer, come closer, closer" and then when you're close enough, it does this maniacal holler/laughing "nanny nanny boo boo" thing. It's creepy. And hilarious. My husband proudly displays his little collection all over the entry to the house, and then my three-year-old avoids the front door all month until "the closers" are gone. I would prefer cutesy ghosts and spiders and bats and that kind of thing, but allowing a little scary here and there is just a concession I've made over the years.

Terrifying. Look away.

 When I was a kid, my mom made great costumes and my dad would take us around the neighborhood to trick or treat. Mom made chili and garlic bread and out we went. I always intended to continue that tradition, and for the most part, that's the basis for what we now do. We gather with friends and family, have chili and cornbread and dress in costumes from a party store or second-hand store. We stop first at our neighbor's house, where the elderly lady who lives there proudly gives each of the kids a personalized treat bag and beer to the parents. Hilarious. Then we descend upon the 'hood in a group of 15 to 25, weaving our way down to grandma and papa's house. Their house is the last stop, and we collapse there while the kids re-enact the Wall Street trading floor with chaotic candy trading. It's great.

However.

There was a time when it was proposed to me, specifically and personally, that any Halloween celebrations were in league with the devil, trick-or-treating was a nod of support to a high holiday of the occult, and that as a Catholic, I should denounce all Halloween festivities altogether. I was a young mom, and I was given a children's book about why Christians should not participate in any Halloween festivities, no matter how benign they seemed. I was engulfed by a current which would not even utter the word "Halloween," favoring "All Saints Eve" or "All Hallows Eve" and the like. (And no, it did not seem to matter that these phrases meant THE EXACT SAME thing as "Halloween." The word "Halloween" was awkwardly and deliberately avoided in conversation.) It was heavily suggested that my tiny family should not begin a tradition of trick-or-treating and Halloween decor, in favor of purely saint-oriented activities, since "All Hallows Eve" was the evening before the Catholic feast of All Saints Day. (On All Saints Day, Catholics call to mind all saints living and dead, and then proceed to honor All Souls Day the next day.) I was young, I did begin to try to conform to the expectation very clearly placed in front of me, but I was extremely uncomfortable doing it. I just did not agree that my mom's chili, a Princess Lea costume, and a butterfinger were evil.

Even so, as my "good girl" pattern often dictated, I tried this anti-Halloween thing out once. One year about 15 years back, we put wings on our little girl so she would be an angel and went to a Halloween alternative "saint" party on "All Hallows Eve." There were little ring toss games and bowling games all with Catholic themes (i.e. knock down the seven deadly sins and you win or name the saint games.) I found the whole thing very divisive, because I sensed a very clear "WeEEee don't go trick or treating or celebrate 'Halloween.' WeEEee celebrate All Hallows Eve and we are very holy for doing so." Maybe that's likely not what everyone there was intending, but it was what I perceived. My head was a whirlwind of thoughts but I went through the motions with everyone else, clapping with glee when a kid tossed three balls in three jars labeled Jealousy, Envy, and Gluttony. Eventually, I found my courage, and I had one of those pivotal moments where I decided this was not the path I would choose. After about an hour, I shoved a wand in my angel's hand, told her she was now a fairy, and we went trick or treating.

For the record, I think saint parties are fine and Catholic themed games are just fine. I love learning about saints, and actually, some of them would make for a really gruesome costume. (Alas, no St. Lucy's eyeballs on a plate at that saint party though.) What I didn't like, was that I felt forced to default to the anti-Halloween mindset because MY Halloween trick-or-treating tradition was suddenly being labeled by another as akin to the demonic.

There's so much more to unpack here. I can't possibly do it all at once, but for starters:

Sorry pagans and occultists, Halloween is a CATHOLIC holiday.(Although plenty of American celebrate it as a "uniquely American tradition" and attach no religious significance to it whatsoever. Costume parties and candy work just fine within a secular context.) Here's one of 8 million articles about it. I always found it ironic that we were, at that time,  discouraged from Halloween traditions by other Catholics.
--and--
Much of modern anti-Halloween sentiment is actually rooted in anti-CATHOLIC sentiment. Here's another of 8 million articles on that. It's totally crazy that when some Catholics are favoring "Harvest" parties over Halloween parties, they are actually emulating a tradition that definitely has pagan roots.

As far as I'm concerned, if you claim to be anti-Halloween and won't dress up or trick or treat because of what occultists have attached to Halloween, and yes that is a reality, that's fine. (You're actually anti-occult, not anti-Halloween. That's good. So am I.) But you better pray against that just as hard on every other night of the year as well, because evil doesn't rear its ugly head on one "big" night and then go away. If you believe Jesus conquers all, then believe it 365 days of the year. Jesus isn't a 364 day warranty that runs out every Halloween. Don't equate me or anyone else with the devil's cohort because I dress my kid as Buzz Lightyear and hand out snickers, and because we're a close target.

After that year, I made no apologies for celebrating Halloween the way we wanted. I empathize with those who fear Halloween, but I will not pretend to be one of them, even in the midst of many people who loudly denounce the holiday. I don't like the super-gory and super-slutty direction some secular traditions have ventured into, and we avoid those elements of Halloween.

On Halloween, we dress up our houses and ourselves, we're little bit scary and lotta bit funny, we make chili and wander around the neighborhood big and small, and we laugh as the big kids teach the little ones to say "trick or treat." We get a little scared here and there, and then we follow up with telling the kids about how fear is always conquerable. We laugh at the dark and spooky. We go to Mass the next day and spend two days honoring friends and family who have passed away, and we spend time thinking about our souls and praying for all dead and alive. Sounds pretty Catholic if you ask me.