Oct 27, 2015 3 min read

It has been almost a year since conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly declared victory in the “War on Christmas.”

According to the FOX News host, non-Christians failed miserably in their efforts to force retail workers to say “Happy Holidays!” rather than “Merry Christmas!”

Not satisfied with this, however, Donald Trump has promised that when he is president, he will build a wall around Christmas and make non-Christians pay for it.

So let’s talk about the War on Halloween. Oh, it’s real, all right.

Remember when Halloween was all about doing devilish things? Throwing rolls of toilet paper into trees. Soaping windows. Egging houses. Putting a burning bag containing dog poop on your neighbor’s porch, ringing the doorbell and running away? Today, you’d be jailed for vandalism.

Remember when you could dress as a “bum” by putting soot on your face, wearing ragged clothes and carrying a bindle on a stick over your shoulder? Today, you’d be called “insensitive to the homeless.”

Halloween used to be the province of banshees, ghosts, ghouls, skeletons, vampires, witches, wraiths, zombies and other frightening characters – vegans, for example.

But recently, some parents have revived the idea of making Halloween non-frightening by banning scary costumes and downplaying the macabre elements of All Hallows’ Eve.

This first was tried in America, with some success, in the late 1800s. By the 1930s, however, Americans had decided that a world war, Prohibition, the Dust Bowl and stock market crashes were a whole lot more terrifying than anything they might encounter on Halloween.

But the War on Halloween actually started millennia ago, when the Romans, having conquered the Celts, decided to combine some of their own fall festivals with Sahmain, the Celtic celebration of the end of summer and the harvest.

Sahmain also was the start of the Celtic new year, on Nov. 1. Why the Celtic year started Nov. 1 we’re not sure, but historians believe it had something to do with waiting until the World Series was over.

Centuries later, the Roman Catholic Church sought to divert the attention of pagans and trick them into thinking religion is fun by combining these seasonal celebrations with church festivals.

Thus, winter solstice celebrations became Christmas, and a day in remembrance of Christian martyrs, originally held May 13, was expanded to honor the souls of the dead, then moved to Nov. 1.

For the past few years, some Christian groups again have tried to remove any hint of the pagan from Halloween. No devils, please. No zombies, please – unless of course, the undead person is Jesus.

One Christian-oriented website suggests, as “non-scary” costumes, the “10 Plagues of Egypt.”

Here’s how it works:

You and nine of your friends dress up as water-turned-to-blood, hail, cattle disease, flies, locusts, frogs, lice, boils, three-days-of-darkness or death-of-the-firstborn.

All these are pretty scary to me, as surely they must have been to Pharaoh and his gang. Plus, try making any of these out of things you have around the house after Party City runs out of three-days-of-darkness costumes.

But here’s the main thing: We like to be scared, but safely.

Walking the earth this Oct. 31 will be plenty of grown men and women raised by parents who allowed them to be frightened as kids, but who explained to them the difference between reality and fantasy and made sure they understood it.

Would you ban roller coasters, colonoscopies, job interviews, insurance salesmen and first dates? Because all can be terrifying.

Yet we live to fright another day.