The second "most wonderful time of the year"...

Someone asked me today (in reference, I'm sure, to my Friday meander), "What do you say to someone about Hallowe'en?" Other than what I have previously said, these are the only other thoughts I really have on the matter:

According to the National Retail Foundation (in 2017):  "More than 171 million Americans plan to celebrate Hallowe'en this year, spending an average $82.93, up from last year's $74.34. Total spending is expected to reach $8.4 billion, an all-time high in the history of NRF's annual survey conducted by Prosper Insights." Close to $2.7 billion of that will be spent on home decor.

To put that in perspective, the NRF's "Winter Holiday" prediction for 2016 was between $678.75 billion and $682 billion. To further put that into real-world perspective, the GNP of the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2016 was 57.83 billion. If Congo is a little too Third-World for you to think that is a significant statistic, the 2016 GNP for Greece was 289.1 billion.

I am not saying people don't have a right to waste spend their hard-earned money as they see fit, What I am saying is, I think we need to get a little perspective here. I get it, people just want to have fun. Golly, I want to have fun, too! I really am not the stick-in-the mud, killjoy you imagine. And, let's face it, despite all our discretionary spending, the US, Australia, and Canada rank right up there on the 2017 World Giving Index... 

...right BEHIND Myanmar, Indonesia, Kenya, and New Zealand. (Yeah, you heard me right.)

So, aside from the fact that celebrating a "holiday" that clearly has pagan roots and makes no effort to disguise that fact, aside from the fact that we could clearly be doing a better job of helping our neighbor (or to quote Jesus/Yeshua, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’)...what's my point, you ask?

No point, just making a statement of fact. Draw your own conclusions.