This is the week I’ve struggled with as a mom for 23 years. I won’t go into all the reasons I don’t like Halloween right now. This post here shows my thoughts which I wrote up years ago. Since I penned that, I’ve found more moms’ thoughts that bolster up my thinking. Amy Roberts of raisingarrows.net has a blog here about it. Then my younger, artistic sister Emily, who has always loved Halloween (until being a mom of 6 little kids, aka candy-lovers caught up with her), wrote here about her current hatred of the day.

So I don’t feel quite alone in being a “mean mom” to her kids because I refuse to let them go trick-or-treating. Ever since Baby #2 (she’s 24 now) was almost 1. None of the seven kiddos have memories of doing it. The result: we have no memories of being sick during the winter with horrible coughs, colds, or ear infections because of the overkill of sugar from Halloween.

I love the idea from Amy of raisingarrows.net to call the day Reformation Day. That’s because Oct. 31 is the day Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany. In honor of that on some of the nights this week, I’m watching all three parts of BYUTV’s Fires of Faith series. You can watch all the parts for free here.

It’s all about the Reformers/martyrs who paved the way for religious freedom and the Restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I also love my friend Emily Satterthwaite’s idea to call it Heroween instead of Halloween. That completely gels with the plan I’ve had for decades to celebrate heroes on this day. Heroween is easier to say than Reformation Day. It’s so serendipitous that the Quest class I mentored a few years ago for teens is all about heroes moving the cause of liberty forward. So when I mentored that class, we had a Quest Heroween party as shown here. Another year, before that, we gathered around my firepit in AZ, ate s’mores, played the Guess the Hero game, and then I shared stories about heroes.

This year my friend and I are going to have a Heroween/Harvest of Heroes party. The kids will give clues as to what hero they dressed up as and then we’ll play Guess the Hero. We will eat chili in a pumpkin, pumpkin spice popcorn, and watch Greater. If you haven’t watched Greater, you are missing out! It’s a great movie about a scholar athlete. The football theme, as well as the fact that it’s a true story, aaaaand that he was Christian makes it THE perfect movie for the day. I thank my friend Cyndi Hampton for tipping me off about it.