{"id":8405,"date":"2009-10-30T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-30T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2009\/10\/30\/trick-or-treat-not-quite-sure\/"},"modified":"2009-10-30T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2009-10-30T12:00:00","slug":"trick-or-treat-not-quite-sure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2009\/10\/30\/trick-or-treat-not-quite-sure\/","title":{"rendered":"Trick or Treat? Not Quite Sure"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Source:http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/omsweetom\/2009\/10\/halloween.html<\/p>\n<p>USA, October 30, 2009 (By Vineet Chander): Growing up, I always experienced Halloween as a clashing of cultures. More than any other American holiday, Halloween seemed to draw a line in the sand between the world that my Hindu immigrant parents resided in and the American suburban world around me. Since Halloween usually tends to coincide with a number of Hindu holidays (Hindus use a lunar calendar, so exact dates switch around), when Diwali happened to fall on October 31, the two holidays went head-to-head. Either I could go trick-or-treating and watch the Nightmare on Elm Street marathon (my desire), or visit temple and exchange sweets with relatives (my parents&#8217; orders), but I couldn&#8217;t really do both.<\/p>\n<p>And then there was the issue of costumes.<\/p>\n<p>Recently I was asked what I thought about having kids dress up as Hindu Deities. I have to admit, his question caught me off guard. A bindi-wearing Indian Princess is one thing, but dressing up like a Goddess&#8230;?<\/p>\n<p>The more I thought about it, though, the less sure I became of how I felt about the whole thing. Would it be a celebration of Hinduism&#8217;s rich imagery, or a mockery of faith? On the hand, there is precedent for dressing up as deities in Hinduism. Many parents dress their children up as Lord Krishna on Krishna Janmashtami. Ramleela &#8212; dramatic re-enactments of Lord Rama&#8217;s epic pastimes &#8212; also involve children and adults donning costumes to depict figures such as Lord Rama, the brave Hanuman, or the dastardly demon king Ravana.<\/p>\n<p>(Read more at source above)<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source:http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/omsweetom\/2009\/10\/halloween.html USA, October 30, 2009 (By Vineet Chander): Growing up, I always experienced Halloween as a clashing of cultures. More,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8405\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}