Dear Editor,
I believe the family, an institution on the brink of extinction, would benefit from the celebration of holidays like Thanksgiving Day and even perhaps Halloween in Guyana. We see today the countless examples of family members slaughtering each other in Guyana and a world where real families are very hard to find.
Thanksgiving Day is celebrated in the United States, Canada and even Grenada. I think it should be celebrated here. This holiday not only celebrates the gifts that God has given to His people in terms of food and crops grown throughout the gardens of the world but it is a day when families gather together (not that they shouldn’t gather together every day) to purposely give thanks for the many blessings that they enjoy.
Why the holiday would also be beneficial to celebrate in Guyana is that it would encourage people to think about God and about the abundant blessings that come forth year after year. Guyana is a nation that is very dependent on its agricultural resources: the crops, livestock and other forms of food. Therefore, it would not be strange to celebrate this holiday, as we have much to be thankful for during the past year.
Halloween also possess some worthy qualities which would be good for our families in Guyana, especially our children. This would be their exclusive holiday. It may have its pagan background, but so does Christmas, and yet we enjoy Christmas each year, don’t we? The common wedding ring has its pagan background as well. We can’t escape nor can we criticize because at some point or the other in our lives we have embraced, as it were, many pagan cultures.
Halloween is celebrated in countless countries of the world including the US, Canada, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Japan, the United Kingdom and even parts of Australia.
Who can take away such joy and frolic from the children year after year as they go trick-or-treating on the night of October 31? And we Guyanese have begun to acknowledge Thanksgiving and Halloween in various ways.
We have Thanksgiving dinners being advertised in the media each year and Halloween costumes for sale at various stores. There are even Halloween parties on Halloween night. Children in North America look forward to Halloween like they do Christmas Eve night when Santa makes his rounds. Families assist them in getting costumes, putting them on and even go trick-or-treating together! Yes, even the grown-ups have embraced Halloween.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) uses Halloween each year to collect donations during trick-or-treating for outreach projects. They have collected more than $119 million since the programme’s launch in the 1950s.
But your readers may say, “Your writer is a Catholic and he’s advocating the celebration of this holiday!” Yes, I am Catholic and I am surely not speaking for all Catholics in my letter. Views may vary. But we do believe there is a world that extends beyond our world − some call it hell or Hades − the underworld as it is. That world extends beyond our own which we can see, where there are no angels and good is absent. Maybe, there presently are the ghosts and goblins that are personified each Halloween night around the world. We must never think that there is only good in our world. The feasts of All Saints Day and All Souls Day the day after, both of which have been positioned immediately following Halloween (October 31) is only a happenstance in history. October 31 is also the Protestant Reformation anniversary when Martin Luther broke away from the Roman Church back in the 1517. The eve of All Saints is known as All Hallow’s Eve or Halloween. However, just as Christmas has been commercialized, the same has been done to a holiday like Halloween that began simply as a vigil for the day after, All Saints on November 1.
So while we may not like the holiday Halloween itself, we can still embrace its message of bringing families together and bringing much joy to our children. The same goes for Thanksgiving. Think about it. Isn’t that what families are about?
If we can celebrate odd things like ‘Hand Washing Day’ I think we can have time to spare to celebrate Thanksgiving and Halloween.
Yours faithfully,
Leon Jameson Suseran
