Welcome to Douglas Wilson's Blog and May Blog, presented by Canon Press.

Okay, so Halloween is almost here again, October 24th, 2022.

Introduction. Every year around this time you can frequently see Christians going in two opposite directions.

One says that the celebration of Halloween is obviously verboten and to the extent that it has any vestiges of Christianity related to it at all,

they are obviously papiced. The other path points out that Halloween is a Christian holiday for pity's sake, embedded in the church calendar,

and so just lighten up everybody. And I want to say yeah, but in both directions.

Suffocating Holidays. Approached in the right spirit, the church year helps us to establish a rhythm of holiness.

We learn to mark our days with reference to the life of Christ. Our lived experience is defined by the incarnation and the ascension instead of a secularized experience marked by memorial day and labor day.

As with everything else, there's a ditch on both sides of this particular road, meaning that the thing can be overdone or not done at all in a spirit of pinched and souriousness.

By the time of the high medieval period, the thing was obviously overdone. You couldn't swing a cat without hitting some saints day or other, and the 28 finger bones of Saint Andrew could be visited all over Europe.

It was a time of great superstition, and over time the whole thing became suffocating.

Two approaches to this suffocating reality than developed. One was what the Protestant reformers did. They paired the church calendar way back, marking a handful of particular days that had reference to the life of Christ.

Thus we got the five evangelical feast days. Christmas, good Friday, Easter, ascension, and Pentecost.

Gone was the feast of the martyrdom of the goldfish of Saint Dennis. There was some intramural disagreements among Protestants about how and how much to pair.

Calvin, for example, wanted to anchor Christmas to a Sunday, the way we do with Easter, while some of Cromwell's men would patrol the streets of London on Christmas Day in order to detect the smell of anybody cooking a Christmas dinner so as they could bust them.

But just as I had a little fun with the goldfish of Saint Dennis, so also the friends of an overstuffed church calendar have had a little merriment and fun that was Cromwell's men, and their efforts at Pius Buzzkill.

More about this in a bit. But whether you were Protestant or not, you still had to deal with the suffocation factor. The Protestant effort had been to make the holidays more like the original Holy Days, and that meant doing it less and doing it right.

The alternative custom that developed was to grant, with a wink and a nod, certain limited holidays from Holiness. Those are the two options, fewer Holidays of Holiness, or more Holidays from Holiness.

This is best illustrated with another event from the swollen and overgrown church calendar, which would be Mardi Gras. This is the period right before Lant, which is a period of abstinence and penitence leading up to Easter.

Because of the giving up part of Lant, Mardi Gras became the blowout time when you got all your sinning in beforehand. Get your sinning done before the deadline.

Thus, if you want, as part of your observance of the resurrection of our Lord Jesus from the dead, and I can scarcely believe I am writing this, you can go to New Orleans during Mardi Gras to get glued, screwed, and tattooed.

There would appear to be a disconnect somewhere in the thought processes of a whole lot of people.

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