We don’t celebrate Halloween. If you don’t know why, you can google it and see the origins and why lots of Christians choose to forego celebrating this holiday.
I don’t want to talk about why we don’t celebrate it. I want to talk about what we do instead.
We have done basically the same thing for years, but we now have a theme that we center these activities around – something we can sink our teeth into celebrating. We celebrate FREEDOM!
We know people who celebrate The Reformation on this day because it was Oct. 31st when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door at Wittenburg. We considered that, but after we learned more about the Reformers, we decided there was something even more important that we wanted to celebrate than what the Reformers did.
We decided to celebrate the freedom we have in this nation – the freedom of speech and religion especially.
Because of these freedoms, we are able to homeschool.
These freedoms are being threatened and taken from us during these days, so it is even more important that we take this time to thank God for what we still have and to pray for preservation and restoration of the freedom and liberty that God provided for us with the founding of this nation.
Well, that is what we have chosen to celebrate at the end of October.
And here is how we go about celebrating it:
1. I write out questions for each set of kids that correspond with things they have learned and things I expect them to know.
2. I buy a bunch of candy.
3. I ask each kid a question. I try to get somebody to help me with this part. One year my parents were visiting us at that time of year, so I had them take a page of questions and hand out candy when the child answered a question correctly. Gary takes some of them sometimes, and sometimes the older kids help with this.
4. I usually have questions for the older kids, too. (After all, they want candy too!)
5. One year I had them wear Mario shirts because almost all of the kids had them already. They could wear a costurme if they wanted to.
6. Basically anything that will combine learning, review, fun and candy, so that we can celebrate our freedom to homeschool, our freedom to worship God, our freedom to believe what we think is true, and our freedom to say what we believe.
As I write this, I’m reminded of how great the threat is to these freedoms under the current administration and in the present climate in this country. This year on Oct. 31, I think that we will spend some time in prayer that these freedoms will remain in our nation and that revival will come and the foundations will be restored.
We can take this opportunity to celebrate what God has done in giving us a free country to live in, and we can also pray that God will protect us from those who are trying to take that freedom away from us.
The enemies of liberty are all around us. But God is greater.
Now that is something to celebrate!
If you want to see the progression of how we came to celebrate Freedom Day you can check out these posts from the last couple of years:
https://www.penneydouglas.com/2010/11/01/happy-freedom-of-religion-day/
https://www.penneydouglas.com/2011/10/31/snow-and-a-mario-party-homeschool-review/
"Oh that God would give every mother a vision of the glory and splendor of the work that is given to her when a babe is placed in her bosom to be nursed and trained! Could she have but one glimpse in to the future of that life as it reaches on into eternity; could she look into its soul to see its possibilities; could she be made to understand her own personal responsibility for the training of this child, for the development of its life, and for its destiny,--she would see that in all God's world there is no other work so noble and so worthy of her best powers, and she would commit to no other's hands the sacred and holy trust given to her." -JR Miller
