Americans spent over $12B dollars on candy, costumes, and decorations in 2023. Spending habits were slightly lower in the preceding few years, although some of the recent surge is related to inflation.
Casual comparison of retail shelves now as compared with a decade ago reveals a wider variety of creative ways to decorate the home, inside and out. Some items are even borrowed from other holidays, such as spooky advent calendars and “Christmas” trees decked out in skeletons. Many consumers slowly drive, cycle, or walk through residential neighborhoods to admire the increasingly lavish displays of tombstones, skeletons, and familiar characters given a Halloween makeover.
Perhaps Halloween has grown in popularity in recent years as a means of escape. Disguises, parties, food, and the supernatural all provide a distraction from America’s precarious political and financial landscape, not to mention the emotional pressures of everyday life. Certainly, this “holiday” appears to have grown in both popularity and profitability.
Reformation Day celebrates the fact that Christians in America no longer pay the church for “indulgences.” Justin Holcombe explained that, until Luther started the Reformation, “spiritually earnest people were told to justify themselves by charitable works, pilgrimages, and all kinds of religious performances and devotions. They were encouraged to acquire this ‘merit,’ which was at the disposal of the church, by purchasing certificates of indulgence.” Although changes were not immediate, Luther’s 95 theses started a movement that would do the opposite of Halloween – stop people from spending money for privileges the church had no business trying to sell.
Church corruption, aided by the inability of most people to read Latin (or to read at all), led to believers faithfully spending their money to try and buy their way into heaven. They thought they could even pay for a loved one to be removed from purgatory into heaven. The Bible teaches that Christ alone has paid the price for redemption. Paul wrote, “By grace you have been saved through faith.” (Ephesians 2:8)
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