A Biblical View of Grief and Halloween: Death Isn’t Decoration

I tense up when the calendar turns to October. On one hand, I love seeing pumpkin patches pop up around town, the smell of cinnamon brooms that greet me in the grocery store, and waking to crisp mornings (even in Florida!).

I don’t love the death-obsessed Halloween displays.

Death isn’t a decoration. The gruesome and gory Halloween decorations hit different after loss.

I don’t get why people “decorate” with cemeteries in their front yards. It turns my stomach to see coffins on the lawn and skeletons hanging from trees.

When you’ve gone through the brutal ache of picking out a headstone for someone you’d dearly love to hold again, you don’t see them as child’s play.

When you’ve witnessed your loved one take their last breath on earth, you understand death is sacred and not sport.

And when you’ve bent over a casket to give one last kiss through hot tears and linger over the hand of your loved one, funerals just aren’t funny.

When did we become a culture that makes light of death?

We shield children from funerals because they’re too heavy but let them traverse a yard decked with the Grim Reaper, arms dangling from windows, and scenes with half-clothed skeletons.

Halloween’s On Trend Death-Obsession

Christians have always needed discernment in how to observe or skip Halloween because of its roots. (Every Woman a Theologian has a great overview.)

But Halloween has shifted from a day of candy corn and kids in costumes to a fixation on the morbid. Better Homes and Garden ran an article to transform your suburban yard into ghoulish spaces, not just the night of Halloween but the whole month of October. In one Facebook group, a commenter suggested making “a freshly dug grave with cross instead of tombstone with leg arm hand sticking out. Leave a shovel in the mound -put a scary mask on a head sticking out… some half dead flowers…”

“Halloween décor has become across the land an industrial pageant of death,” journalist Peggy Noonan writes. Where Halloween displays were once made of pumpkins, mums, and bedsheet ghosts, yards are now marked with unapologetic gore, dismemberment, staged murder, and other horrors.

When I wrote about Halloween and grief in my Saturday Hope Note, one reader replied that her new neighbor, who had just buried her 13-year-old son after suicide, could barely leave her house because of the next-door neighbor’s coffin decorations.

Another reader shared that her local cemetery is holding its first annual trunk or treat. It’s both dishonoring and incongruous for the same cemetery where families have gathered in fresh sorrow and where gravesites are lovingly tended by those deeply bereaved to become a playground with candy and amusement for children and families.

And one South Carolina couple stages scenes so grim people have called 9-1-1, like a plane crash with skeleton passengers including one hanging from a tree and a mock car accident complete with overturned van and skeleton trapped inside.

A Biblical View of Grief and Halloween

For Christians, death isn’t something to fear or mock. Death is the consequence of sin and evidence that we live in a sin-filled world. It’s an enemy that Jesus paid his life to defeat. (1 Corinthians 15:25-26)

“We shouldn’t glorify or romanticize death—Jesus didn’t. He wept over it,” says Randy Alcorn. (John 11:35)

Death is painful. Sometimes it’s a slow, daily loss of the person who fights through brutal treatments and pain, sometimes it’s the excruciating loss of a baby or child way too soon, and sometimes it’s loss through blatant trauma or evil violence. How can any of that be celebrated?

And gravesites are deeply meaningful places where we remember and honor the life of people who are loved. They are markers of loss and pain this side of heaven. Gravestones are lovingly chosen and placed, engraved with scriptures, words, pictures, and symbols of meaning. It’s why we hush at cemeteries and never walk over but around a grave.

Death isn’t creepy or scary. It’s sacred.

For Christians, death is the entrance to heaven. Our posture should be that of Paul who declared, “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” (Philippians 1:21, ESV)

Our last breath on earth isn’t gory but glory as we take our first breath in the presence of our God. Jesus “will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:4, ESV)

Because of Jesus and the hope of resurrection, death isn’t haunted. It’s hallowed.

We should think about death, but not in a way that’s morbid or fearful, and not in a way that celebrates or trivializes it. Because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, death has lost its sting. (1 Corinthians 15:55) It’s a reminder that this world is not our home, that we’re to live in light of eternity, and hold a healthy longing for heaven.

Jesus is the resurrection and life. “Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25, 26, ESV)

So this October? I’ll savor a day at the pumpkin patch, autumn leaves dotting my running trail, and a cozy sweatshirt on cool mornings. I’ll watch my grandlittles’ delight as they dress up as superheroes and classic characters.

But I’ll revel in our heavenly hope and take a hard pass on all things death-obsessed for Halloween.