Boo!
Did you know that Halloween is the biggest adult holiday of the year? For kids, it’s the second biggest holiday. This year, the National Retail Federation estimates that Americans will spend more than 8.8 billion dollars* on Halloween related activities and merchandise, with $3.2 billion spent on costumes, $2.7 on decorations, $2.6 billion on candy, and $390 million on greeting cards.
More than 172 million Americans — 52% of the population — will celebrate Halloween this year. Each year, more people — especially millennials — are buying costumes for their pets. The most popular costumes for pets are pumpkin, hot dog, bumble bee, devil, and cat (for dogs).
Halloween Horror Nights at the Universal Studios Theme Park in Orlando, Florida, scheduled 26 “Horror Nights” this year on various dates between September 13 and November 3. Single-night tickets range in price from $88.99 to $114.99. Almost 80% of the tickets will be purchased by people who are 18 years or older.
Why do you think Halloween is so popular with adults? One theory is that it gives them an opportunity to pretend to be someone else for an evening, which allows them to escape from the realities of everyday life.
In one scene of the Broadway play, Phantom of the Opera, at a masquerade party, the cast sings a song that begins with the following lyrics:
“Masquerade, paper faces on parade, masquerade, hide your face so the world will never find you.”
There’s a music box that is owned by the Phantom that plays — at the beginning and end of the play — the music from the first line of the masquerade song. At the end of the play, when the music box is played, the Phantom, realizing that he is about to be caught by the authorities, sings the line one last time: “Masquerade, paper faces on parade, masquerade, hide your face so the world will never find you.”
When Adam and Eve sinned, what was the first thing they did? They hid parts of their bodies from each other and then hid themselves from God.
Our worst faults are often completely hidden from ourselves. While the people who know us best can usually see our faults, most of the time we fail to see our own faults because our pride has completely blinded us to them. And the people who know and love us the most have given up on trying to tell us what our faults are because they know that we’ll react with anger and outrage.
When we make a good confession, we are encouraged to probe, acknowledge, and make an admission that we do in fact have faults.
When we confess our sins, we become naked before God, exposed for what we truly are — sinners.
For Halloween this year, do something unique. Go to confession and peel away the mask that stands between you and our Lord. Ask Him to give you the humility and courage to see yourself the same way He sees you.
You will never truly grow in holiness until you possess the humility and courage to see and admit your own faults and then work toward perfecting yourself by eliminating those faults, while replacing them with virtues.
It’s okay to hide from the world sometimes, but it’s not a very good idea to hide from yourself or from God.
What are your plans for the biggest adult holiday of the year?
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* As a point of reference, if someone gave you $1,000 every day for 2,739 years, you would have $1 billion dollars. Every time you hear about a company making a billion dollars or about our Government spending another billion dollars of our taxes, think about how great it would be to receive $1,000 every day for the next 2,739 years. That’s a billion dollars. You and I could live pretty well with that kind of money rolling in.
