What Halloween 2004 taught me as a Christian

The snowy day I learned about hospitality, compassion, and faith

We packed up our entire lives and relocated to rural western Montana in the summer of 2004, when our kids were seven and four. Only one other child lived on our little dirt road with its half a dozen homes in the shadow of the Bitterroot Mountains, and he was only a short-term resident. Fortunately, that little boy had a dog, so our kids and our pup each had a playmate for awhile. Unfortunately, it appeared that Justin’s family was struggling in many ways.

When the leaves began to fall that year, I caught Justin admiring the four pumpkins lined up on our front porch. His empty hands were jammed into his pockets. “You guys don’t happen to have an extra punkin, do ya?”

“I’m afraid not,” I replied. The four of us; mom, dad, and two kids; looked forward to carving jack-o-lanterns every year, and we had bought just enough.

Justin nodded and shrugged, then turned to walk back to his patchwork trailer down the lane.

I bit my lip as I watched him go.

The next day we remembered to pull the pumpkins into the house first thing in the morning so they could thaw before we tried to carve them later that afternoon. Typical for late October in Montana, the mercury had dropped steadily all week.

As if on cue, as soon as I had spread the dining room table with newspaper and pencils and assorted knives and spoons and bowls, then set one pumpkin at each of our four chairs, Justin knocked on the front door.

“Can the kids come out and play?”

“Actually, we were just sitting down to . . . uh . . . let me see if . . . can you hang on a second, Justin?” I closed the door most of the way and turned to confer with my husband in hushed tones. He nodded. We both smiled. I turned back to the door and opened it wide. “Justin, we are just about to carve our pumpkins. Would you like to help?”

He beamed and entered the house, rubbing his hands together to warm them for the task ahead, and boasting—as only an eight-year-old can do—about his skills related to gutting and scraping. We directed him to sit in front of the largest pumpkin, the one that would require the most help. Soon we were all elbow-deep in slippery orange goo.

Once they were all scraped clean, we took our offer a step further. “Would you like to draw the face on the pumpkin for us to carve?”

His eyes lit up. All three kids and I set to work on creating our designs. Andy played supervisor. We helped each of the kids with the actual carving, as those orange-handled, serrated safety knives had not yet hit the market.

Once finished, the three kids lined up for a photo, each holding their classic masterpiece—geometric shapes for eyes and nose, angry eyebrows, and a snaggle-tooth smile. The human grins on the top row of the photo contrasted perfectly with the scowls on their jack-o-lanterns below.

“That was real fun. Thanks for lettin’ me help, Mr. and Mrs. Chidwick.”

“You’re welcome, Justin. We always enjoy having you in our home.”

He looked at the pumpkins, our kids, and us one more time, then nodded and grinned and headed for the door. The carving party was over.

“Wait.” I stopped him. “Don’t forget your pumpkin.”

Justin spun around, his eyes full of cautious hope. “For real?”

Andy and I smiled.

Our own kids’ mouths dropped open in excitement. “He gets to keep it?”

“You put all the hard work into it, Justin. It’s your pumpkin.”

Grinning from ear to ear, Justin thanked us politely and gathered the enormous pumpkin into his arms.

“Can you carry that all the way home, or would you like some help?”

He assured us he was plenty strong enough. Indeed, he was a pretty tough little kid—larger than average, with muscle to spare from hard work at home and a passion for football, plus a stiff upper lip—stoic even when injured in a way that would leave my own kids in a puddle of tears. I opened the door for him, and he proudly carried his treasure down the front steps.

He hadn’t made it 15 yards from the house, though, when I heard a sickening thud. I knew without even looking up that he had dropped his precious cargo. I looked out the window just in time to see him sink to his knees next to the two broken halves of his beautiful creation. Just as quickly as he had collapsed, however, he stood back up. Head down, he began to shuffle toward home, his once-again empty hands crammed into his pockets.

My heart broke.

I ran to the door and called him back. He turned around. Big, tough Justin had tears streaming down his face as he trudged back up the steps of the front porch. I pulled him into the house and hugged him like any mother would hug any hurting kid. He let me hold him.

“My punkin,” he moaned softly.

This wasn’t just a broken pumpkin; this was a kid’s hopes and dreams that had just split in two. I choke up even now, just reminiscing over the scene.

I pushed his unruly hair back, leaned down, and kissed his forehead. “Take my pumpkin, Justin. I’ll carry it for you.”

He thanked me and tried to smile, but I knew it wasn’t the same.

Just then, Andy, who had gone out to tinker in the shop as soon as the carving was finished, whooshed back in the front door. He had seen the tragic fall from across the yard. With a grin and a wink, Andy swept the kids outside to pick up the pieces and carry them over to the shop. There, Mr. Fix-It hooked up a staple gun to the air compressor and together they created “Franken-pumpkin,” or “Jack-enstein,” or something along those lines. The finished product looked way cooler than the original had ever been, and I watched with a lump in my throat as the whole gang proudly marched it down the lane toward Justin’s place.

Though I had technically been a Christian and an adult for many years, that was the year I learned about hospitality. We didn’t need anything fancy. We just needed to share what we had. And I learned about compassion, too. Noticing others’ pain and doing what we can to bind up the broken-hearted—and their pumpkins—doesn’t diminish our own happiness. On the contrary, it magnifies it.

But the lessons didn’t stop there, that October of 2004.

Some of you are getting uncomfortable. I know Halloween is a very controversial topic in some American Christian circles. Oddly enough, I grew up in the Bible Belt, where dancing and drinking and movies were forbidden by not only our church denomination, but all the denominations deemed legitimate by people like us at that time. (Forgive me, we were products of our environment.) Even games involving dice or playing cards were suspect in our circles then. However, letting kids dress up in costumes and roam the neighborhood in the dark in search of candy (and bags of homemade cookies, and donuts and cider, and full-size caramel apples—ah, the 70s) was perfectly acceptable. Go figure.

This next part of today’s story, then, does involve us partaking in Halloween—not some church harvest festival called Hallow-lujah or a Trunk-or-Treat in the church parking lot with flyers to advertise the Sunday service—nope, the real deal, door-to-door trick-or-treating. If you must turn away now, for reasons of your faith, I understand.  

While the anti-Halloween folks are leaving the room, perhaps this would be a good time to remind you to subscribe to this little newsletter if you haven’t already. That way you will never miss an edition—and they will grow particularly interesting when we hit the road and become intentionally homeless, soon and very soon. Just enter your email address below and these weekly posts will wing their way directly into your email inbox.

You’re still here.

Ok, don’t say I didn’t give you fair warning. Back to the story.

That same year, our first year in Montana, we gathered our two kids in their homemade costumes, as well as my grandfather, who was living with us at that time, and headed out into the night. The first light snow of the season had started a few hours prior, and by the time we were ready to go trick-or-treating, the flurries had begun to stick. We ran back into the house for mittens and hats, then piled into the car. With only six homes on our dirt road, one of them belonging to us and two others that preferred to be left alone, we figured driving to a nearby neighborhood held more promise.

Just before we got down the hill to the highway, Grandpa noticed that Mrs. Stewart, the sweet old shut-in lady at the end of our road, had turned her porch light on. He suggested that we stop. Although not obvious to us, it was clear to him that she was hoping we would come by.

I’m glad we did. We all went in, exchanged hugs, and posed the kids for pictures next to her wheelchair. Mrs. Stewart was delighted. She had a small bowl of candy and admitted she wasn’t really expecting anyone else, so she told the kids to take as much as they wanted. So sweet.

No, really—quite literally—so sweet. Andy and I began to mentally calculate the parental taxes and fees we would collect at the end of the night.

We thanked her and rushed off to the neighborhood a couple of miles down the way, where we picked up my kids’ favorite babysitter and her best friend. The teens had asked if they could come along, as they needed some young ones to escort so they themselves could justify going trick-or-treating. Even their neighborhood involved quite a bit of walking, though, as two-acre lots are considered a tad crowded in these parts.

The snow continued to fall for a short time, then stopped abruptly and the sky cleared, exposing a billion white stars against the velvety black abyss. Breathing the crisp, cold air, crunching through fresh snow, and laughing together under that absolutely breathtaking Big Sky is something I will not easily forget—but that is not the point of this section of the story.

The main event didn’t occur until we were almost home. By eight o’clock, our toes were numb and bedtimes were approaching, so we dropped the teenagers off and headed back to our little dirt road. This time, we all noticed another neighbor’s porch light was turned on. It was the front porch, which she never uses, as everyone she knows is a back door guest. Taking a cue from Grandpa’s earlier observation, I wondered aloud if we should drop in on Mrs. Flink. Tired and cold as we were, everyone agreed it was a good idea.

We pulled into her long driveway, exited the car, and tromped up the rickety steps to her under-utilized front porch. The door opened as soon as we knocked, and Mrs. Flink squealed in delight to see the two kids in their costumes. When she ushered us all into her living room, we discovered that she herself had put great effort into a costume for the occasion. Two quart-size Ziplock bags, each containing several assorted pieces of brightly wrapped candies, a few cookies, a baggy of pistachios (?), and a carefully folded dollar bill waited on the table. She retrieved them and gave one to each wide-eyed child.

As a shut-in on an undersized fixed income, Mrs. Flink had spent the month gradually collecting candies whenever friends had driven her to town for doctor’s appointments and errands, as every business has a bowl of candy on the counter at this time of year. She had assembled the goody bags bit by bit, hoping the new neighbor children would come by on Halloween night. In the thirteen years she had lived on our street, our kids were her very first trick-or-treaters.

It was that Halloween, in 2004, that a pair of elderly shut-in ladies, one sitting quietly in a wheelchair and the other dressed as a witch and cackling, taught me about faith. They did more than hope. They planned. They took action. They prepared for something yet unseen, then waited with expectation.

Maybe, just maybe, Christians (and anyone else, really) can learn quite a bit from Halloween. How much better our world would be if we all left our proverbial porch lights on as a signal to those who are out in the dark and the cold that they are welcome—more than welcome—expected. Hoped for. And when they come, and we answer the door, but they appear different from us—some funny-looking, some odd, some a little frightening—what if, instead of turning them away, we greeted them warmly, paid them compliments, and freely gave them good things? What if we even invited them in? What if we noticed when they dropped their pumpkins and offered to give them our own, or helped them create new and improved pumpkins out of the broken pieces of their old ones, then personally escorted them on their way to see they make it home safely?

What if.

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Before you go, I’d like to thank three of my subscribers for the things they have taught me and the gifts they have given me over the years.

I have known Elena Reynolds since the mid-1980s. Like so many others I know, she and her family were part of the strange little 1990s exodus of acquaintances who decided to leave Long Beach, California and relocate to Vancouver, Washington. My family eventually moved on to Montana; hers moved back to SoCal. Though we ran in the same social circles for so many years, we didn’t know each other well until quite recently, within the last few years. At an unexpected meet-up, we both took a chance and opened up to each other, discovering that each of us had less than Instagram-perfect lives behind the scenes (surprise, surprise!). Since then, we have supported one another through assorted family struggles as we grow in our shared faith through all of life’s unexpected ups and downs. She is one of the people I know I can talk to about anything. She will never turn away awkwardly unsure of what to say. She and her husband have become treasures to me and mine. Thanks, Elena.

I met Meg Roberts on a visit to San Diego to visit my brother and his family. She is a good friend of theirs from the Portland area and had come for a visit the same week I did. Fortunately, they didn’t see our two visits as a conflict and just let them naturally overlap—so I got a new friend out of the deal. Meg is an accomplished runner and reader, meaning she has accomplished far more of each than the average person could ever hope for. She has an inspiring story regarding the running part, which you can check out on her blog. Her obvious knack for recognizing well-crafted literature led me to ask her to critique some of my own writing. Her input has been invaluable to me. Meg is highly intelligent and tells it like it is. She has my utmost respect. Plus, we share the role of Auntie to two precious little girls. Thanks, Meg.

When I first met my husband’s family, back when we were still dating, I will admit his teenage little sister, Ruth Chidwick (now Ruth Musonda), was not really on my radar as a dear friend. Even after Andy and I had married, it took me a little while to catch on to just how amazing Ruth is. Over the years, we have become confidants, adventure buddies, and partners in exploring the deeper issues of faith, family, and life in general. This past summer, we even had the privilege of traveling to Zambia together, where she and her husband Benny introduced us to all his family there—our family now. Ruth is a survivor in many ways, and has led by example in categories of strength, endurance, and courage. I love the way she loves people and pushes herself past her fears and doubts. Thanks, Ruth.

That’s all for now. Next week, I will share with you some very exciting news regarding the fulfillment of a little lifelong dream of mine. I’m kind of over the moon about this, to be honest.

Until next week, friends,

Sherry

If you think others might enjoy or benefit from this post, feel free to share it by clicking below.

And by the way, if you would like to read more about redefining hospitality (and combining it with TRAVEL!), you might want to check out the new Substack I just found: “Welcoming and Wandering” by Keri Wyatt Kent. I discovered Keri because she is a good friend of Susy Flory, a friend I respect who writes over at another excellent Substack called “Question Girl.” Two great reads, two thumbs up.