Just wondering how many christians out there celebrate the 31st of this month.
You mean the Eve of All Saints Day, or Reformation Day? Because I celebrate both.
The Triduum of Allhallowstide (Halloween, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day) is part of the Western Christian Calendar. In the East they instead celebrate the Synaxis of All the Saints on the first Sunday after Pentecost, which was also practiced in (at least some parts of) the West during the middle ages until the Feast of All Saints was moved to November 1st. Actually in the West there was no universal standard, and so there were several different days, depending on location, when All Saints was observed. But the move to November 1st occurred in the late middle ages, beginning around Rome, in honor of the anniversary of when Pope Gregory consecrated the Oratory of All the Saints.
I also enjoy the secular aspects of Halloween--candy, pumpkins, the silly spooky-scary stuff. All those things are just silly fluff aimed primarily for children--for the same reason we give kids chocolate on Easter basically.
The opposition some Christians have toward Halloween is a recent phenomenon, beginning around the late 1960's. Anton LeVeye, the founder of the Church of Satan, in an attempt to rile up religious fundamentalists decided to claim Halloween as some kind of Satanist thing--he did it purely to annoy and troll certain Christians. And it worked, Evangelical response tended to start to treat Halloween as something "evil", even though it's not. And throughout the 1970's and 80's a whole slew of charlatans (such as John Todd and Mike Warnke) began touring churches making all kinds of bogus claims to enrich themselves. Then the Satanic Panic of the 1980's came, which only exasperated matters, in spite of the fact that all claims, rumors, and urban legends were false and no credible evidence for any of the claims ever existed.
Long story short, the only reason some Christians have a problem with Halloween today is because of several decades of propaganda.
Here are some facts:
1. No, Halloween is not based on the ancient Pagan observance of Samhain. The simple fact of the matter is that we don't know much of anything about the ancient Celtic celebration of Samhain, all our information comes from later Christian legends written hundreds of years after Ireland had been converted and from pure conjecture. So the absolute most that could be said about Samhain was that it may have been an ancient Irish Celtic harvest festival, and that the Irish pagans believed that during such periods the boundary between our world and the fairy-world was thinner.
2. Following this, no, human sacrifice never was a thing. This idea comes to us from the writings of Julius Caesar, Caesar in his writings about his conquests of Gaul were that the Gallic Druids practiced human sacrifice. However, it was pretty standard for the Romans to claim that non-Roman societies practiced awful barbaric rites in order to justify the subjugation of those cultures and to promote the belief in the superiority of Roman civilization. In other words, this was likely Roman propaganda. And further, it has literally nothing to do with Halloween, as we've already covered that Halloween has nothing (and never did have anything) to do with Celtic Paganism.
3. Modern day Satanists have Halloween as important to them only because, as already noted, Anton LeVeye was a childish troll. As a rule I don't let Satanists dictate how I live my life, and I don't think other Christians should either.
-CryptoLutheran