We tell our kids that it’s fine to celebrate the good parts of Halloween—the candy and dressing up and spending time with friends and neighbors. In fact, if we opted out of Halloween, we feel like we’d miss out on connecting with neighbors, since Halloween is one of the rare evenings that everyone’s outside!

So we celebrate the good, but we refuse to celebrate the evil—anything that makes light of Satan or his dark forces. For us, the candy and the costumes make the cut. Anything that seems to celebrate evil or death doesn’t. You won’t find witches or ghosts or skeletons or blood at our house. Since death is part of the curse, we don’t want to make light of it. Instead, we decorate with pumpkins and colorful leaves.

Now, we have friends who have skeletons swinging in the breeze on their doorstep, and we have other friends who keep the porch light off and the door locked on Halloween. And like with all things, we trust that these parents are following what they sense God has distinctly called their family to. And so, we train our kids to be respectful of this.

When our kids were preschoolers, I would say, “Sammy’s mom and dad don’t want him to dress up for Halloween, and so when we go to his house today, you may not talk about your costume or trick-or-treating, ok? We want for Sammy to obey his mom and dad cheerfully, right? Because that will make him most happy.”

My husband and I have yet to find another set of parents who are perfectly aligned with us in parenting choices. And yet, we have dozens of Christian couples whom we claim as great friends! We’ve found that being dogmatic about our Christian choices only creates friction. So we respect differences, and we teach our kids to do the same.

“As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” And we will remember that another house–where the Lord is served–might look different than ours on Halloween.