Welcome to Politics by Faith. I'm Mike Slater.

Happy. Thanks for being. If you're new to the podcast, the 30-second elevator pitch,

we take the news of the day, talk it out, talk about what's broken in it, lament the brokenness in it,

then give some historical perspective and biblical peace to hopefully make that anxiety go away so we can literally go to sleep

at night.

Like that's the goal.

There's too much anxiety.

I can't sleep.

So I want to be able to sleep.

So we can wake up, encourage, clear-eyed, and ready to go.

Today's a little bit different because we're going to be talking about Thanksgiving

and not particularly a news topic.

But it's important because I want to make sure we do this ahead of time

because it was on November 2nd's show.

So it was after Halloween.

I talked about how Halloween felt different this year.

It felt especially meaningless. And after some real soul searching, my conclusion was,

it is meaningless. Halloween is a meaningless holiday. Of course it felt meaningless. It is. Or at least what it's become. And I didn't realize until after Halloween. So I wanted to present these thoughts before Thanksgiving. But here's the deal. Halloween used to be a Christian holiday. It was all hollow's Eve. And you smush those words together, you get

Halloween. But hollow means to make holy, to consecrate, to set apart, to devote to holy or

religious exercises, to treat as sacred, to revere, to honor as sacred.

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be thy name. All Hallows Eve means the day before Eve, the day before All Saints Day, which was November 1st.

And that was the day that we set aside to celebrate the great Christian men and women who have come before us.

...