Halloween.

I am thankful for Halloween.

I’ve never been much of a Halloween fan, mostly because I don’t like scary things or donning costumes. And these days I don’t eat a lot of candy either. (Unfortunately, I’ve learned that chocolate consumption is inversely related to weight loss. This was an unhappy discovery.) So that effectively knocks out 99% of the holiday’s festivities. But I do love fall, and I especially love Thanksgiving, so I thought I’d spend my holiday energy celebrating what I do love. In honor of Thanksgiving, I’ve mused recently about things in life I’m particularly grateful for.

Ironically enough, one thing I must say I’m grateful for is Halloween. It is because of Halloween and its frightening nightlife that the church I attended in my adolescence created “Hallelujah Night.” Hallelujah Night was the brainchild of the children’s pastor, and I must say, a pretty brilliant one. Costumed children went in groups from room to room in the church, watching skits of Bible stories. Every room gave out hundreds of pounds of candy over the course of the three nights, and a really long line of children waiting to participate always snaked around the church. There was a Jonah room where you were lit up with a black light and sprayed with whale saliva (…or water streaming from water guns), a Lazarus room where a biblical zombie came back to life, a Noah room with more water and strobe lights, a resurrection room with an authentic-looking Jesus (seriously, you should see the man who played Jesus), and the list goes on. (I do wish there’d been an Ahab-and-Jezebel room. Or Balaam and the donkey. Or Sodom, Gomorra, and the pillar of salt. Some highly entertaining Bible stories were completely overlooked.) To this day, when I think of Hallelujah Night, I can smell the black trash bags that lined the walls in the water rooms and the trampled-on popcorn in the fellowship hall.

Since I was an adolescent when I attended the church, I never went through Hallelujah Night as a child, but for years I worked it as a teenager. I was a tour guide, leading the groups through the rooms. It was so much fun rushing around like I was in high demand, wearing a T-shirt that said staff, and acting like the adult I so desperately wanted to be. But even beyond this, Hallelujah Night gave rise to some great memories. I remember my friend J’s mom jumping off a chair in a dark room to scare the workers as we were cleaning up. I remember a water gun fight (thank you, Jonah) between J, me, and some other friends on a cold autumn night on the playground. I remember getting so sick and tired of Sandi Patty’s “Via Dolorosa,” but still tearing up at the end of the resurrection skit every single time. And thanks to Hallelujah Night, and thus Halloween, I met P, one of my very best friends in the whole world.

So I have to be grateful even for one of my least favorite days of the year. Thinking about what my adolescence would’ve been like without Halloween, and thus Hallelujah Night…that’s, frankly, a little scary.