Don’t take all of our festivals too literally

It was interesting to read the anonymised letter “Halloween display was distressing” because I too saw the display in Westgate Street and took a rather different view of it.

I saw Mummy Ghoul and Daddy Ghoul swinging Child Ghoul between them. It is the sort of thing that some parents do to children at any time of the year, and the children generally think it is enjoyable fun.

I came to the conclusion that the children who found it frightening were led to that distressed state by the attitude of the adult with them at the time. Likewise, I have never encountered a child associating Halloween with the occult unless an adult indoctrinates them like that.

Generally it is seen as a great excuse for dressing in costumes and carving pumpkins.

As for pagan rituals, Christmas Day was chosen for the date of the birth of Christ because there was already a pagan ritual for that date and it was easier to “Christianise” it than persuade the people at the time to discontinue it.

Historians using powerful computers to wind back the clock on astronomical data have identified the supernova that created the Crab Nebula as the most likely star that marked the birth of Christ because that would have been bright enough to have been seen in the daytime too, and if that is the case then Christ was actually born in 4BC in early March by today’s calendar.

I have sympathy for the early Christians. They had a mammoth task of convincing others that the religions they had been following all their lives were wrong and should be replaced by their new one.

Telling a few porkies to make that task easier hasn’t destroyed my Christian faith once I found out the real answers might be a bit different.

JF Warren Oldfield Park