Here’s Why the Duggars Don’t Celebrate Halloween

From the costumes to the candy, Halloween is a fun time for children, but not if you were raised as a Duggar.

In a 2011 blog post for TLC, Michelle Duggar revealed that the children abstained from celebrating Halloween. While they go to pumpkin patches and corn mazes, the rest was just not their thing.

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“From the beginning of our marriage we just kind of felt like we didn’t want to celebrate that holiday,” she wrote. “But we enjoy the harvest celebration. Our church fellowship has had different celebrations through the years that we’ve been a part of, ones where the children can play games and receive candy and toys and do all kinds of fun things, like a cake walk.”

If you think the new generation of the Counting On stars will be celebrating and dressing up in cute costumes, don’t bet on it either. Because of the holiday’s 2000-year-old roots related to magic, which is “part of a demonic realm” God wants them to stay away from, no one will be celebrating.

Duggar goes on to reveal that the church is a “safe environment” where no one needs to worry about encountering things that go on “during Halloween” like trick-or-treating, drinking and whatever else you can imagine.

The Duggar children are so foreign to the holiday that in an excerpt from Growing up Duggar, Jill, Jinger, Jessa and Jana Duggar were canvasing for their father’s political campaign in 1998 when they went door-to-door on Oct. 31 in fancy dresses and bags, only to receive candy.

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The girls go on to share that the one specific thing their parents taught them to be careful about is “magic,” which often shows up in children’s movies.

“As harmless as it may seem, it’s not a joke in God’s eyes,” they wrote. “Magic, sorcery, witches, spell-casting and the like are all part of the demonic realm that God wants us to stay away from.”

The sisters go on to share that “no matter how ‘good’ a film containing magic may seem, “God speaks seriously throughout the Bible; it is not something to be glorified or portrayed by any means as something fun or attractive.”