I’m not sure whether or not Halloween is actually “Mormon” to any significant degree. Mormons generally participate in the holiday here in the U.S., of course. And we even have a few requirements of the holiday in a Church setting — for example, we don’t allow masks at Church-sponsored Halloween events. But I don’t think that these facts quite give us a Mormon Halloween.<\/p>\n
Perhaps what we need is a good, Mormon-specific monster!
\n
\nHalloween costumes seem to fall into a few different types, from what I can tell. There are monsters, angels and other “good” characters, superheroes and other comic-book characters, actual people (politicians and celebrities mostly) and, finally, representational characters (e.g., my son was a chess board one Halloween).<\/p>\n
But I’ve never seen a Mormon-related character. Now, I don’t live in Utah, so perhaps I’ve just not been in the right place. Do they sell costumes of the Apostles there? Can my 5-year-old buy a costume of President Monson? (probably not, how would you do it without a mask?)<\/p>\n
I also wonder, would a Mormon character have to be only good? Sure we could somehow do the three Nephites or Nephi or Captain Moroni or something, but who are the bad guys? The devil, I suppose (but he’d have to be radically different — no horns, and represented as non-corporeal somehow) or perhaps King Noah.<\/p>\n
In this dispensation, we have a few boogeymen that might fith the bill — certainly the mobs from the middle 1800s, and the Federal Marshalls from the days of polygamy. Then by the 20th century, the polygamists actually became the boogeymen somehow. I don’t know who you would include today — Evangelicals? Anti-mormons? Those guys that put floride in the water? (GRIN)<\/p>\n
I’m not sure who Mormons are afraid of nowadays (please don’t give me the doctrinal saw that we don’t need to fear anyone — people are afraid anyway — or suggest that our biggest fear is sin — what kind of Halloween costume would that make?), so perhaps it would be better if we came up with our own Mormon superheroes. But then again, what superpower would a Mormon superhero have? Super Faith?<\/p>\n
I’m sure we Mormons could put a lot of fun creativity into this. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll see kids dressed up as Gladys Knight and Donny Osmond ringing our doorbells on Friday.<\/p>\n
If that happens, I’ll have to pull by tongue out of my cheek in order to give a little chuckle and fill their bags with candy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m not sure whether or not Halloween is actually “Mormon” to any significant degree. Mormons generally participate in the holiday here in the U.S., of course. And we even have a few requirements of the holiday in a Church setting — for example, we don’t allow masks at Church-sponsored Halloween events. But I don’t think that these facts quite give us a Mormon Halloween. Perhaps what we need is a good, Mormon-specific monster!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":111,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[54,57,55],"tags":[29],"class_list":["post-4830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mormon-life","category-arts","category-news-politics","tag-popular-culture-and-media"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/111"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4830"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4830\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5931,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4830\/revisions\/5931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}