One day when I was probably in high school, I was perusing the non-fiction books on my parents' bookshelf. I came across this dramatic and odd-looking cover with 80's toys breaking out of a toybox and ready to attack. I initially laughed, and then I realized that some of the toys on the cover, namely CareBears, My Little Pony, and Smurfs, were things that, like Halloween, I was allowed to experience until I was about four, and then, suddenly, they were dangerous and evil. Smurfs were a problem because Gargamel, the bad guy, had a pentagram on his floor, and pentagrams somehow let Satan in. I remember the explanation about My Little Pony seeming a little shakier, something about that they were flying horses, like Pegasus, and that was part of Greek mythology about other gods, and that was sacrilegious. CareBears, shakier still. Yes, they seem positive, and the magic seems fun, but magic is real and all magic is Satanic. Lucifer was a beautiful shiny angel, and he became Satan.
My mom found me sitting on the floor engrossed in reading Turmoil in the Toybox. I laughed and teasingly asked if this was why they had taken away my viewing privileges. She swiped the book from me, not amused, and did not answer my question.
There was a constant vigilance required to keep Satan away. It seemed that no matter how obedient I was and how much I had done to protect myself by avoiding all evil influences, if I let my guard down for an instant or accidentally did something like watch one of these shows on tv past the theme song or play with a non-Christian kid for my enjoyment without the goal of getting them saved, then it could be game over. I remember my parents rushing frantically into the family room on Saturday mornings to turn off the tv. There was always a huge sigh of relief when they managed to do this before the song for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, or Captain Planet finished. Crisis averted. Child saved. Phew.
As a parent, I understand the tricky nature of curating a child's media intake so that they can get the joy out of a truly high-quality story, have a connection with their peers over shared culture, and engage with educational content on topics like dinosaurs and weather and many other topics about which I am not an expert. This must be balanced with making sure that children do not have too much passive in front of a screen and do not encounter inappropriate content that is too scary, too sexy, or too violent for their little minds to process.
The thing is, the severe restrictions on media consumption, friends that I was allowed, and toys I could play with were not to keep me from frightening content. Though encouraging me to play outside or read more may have been a secondary goal, my parents didn't talk much about certain amounts of time spent watching television being unhealthy. I was encouraged to read The Pilgrim's Progress as a young child. The audiobook and a movie version were staples of our media consumption. I remember my mom showing the movie Left Behind: A Thief in the Night to my 5th grade Sunday school class when she subbed for the normal teacher who was out of town. I don't remember her ever being asked to teach Sunday school again. The things that were presented as truth were truly terrifying, and I sure hope there's not much reality to them.
On Halloween when I was 7 (I know the exact year because we had come home from Pizza Hut where there was a big cardboard cutout advertising the upcoming release of Back to the Future II), we quietly made our way through the house from the garage without turning on any lights so that trick-or-treaters wouldn't see anyone in the house and went to the basement where we left the lights off so that they couldn't see the lights from the window wells. When I questioned why we were doing this, the explanation was that Halloween was a time when people participated in demonic activity. It seemed somehow by not answering the door for trick-or-treaters, we would be protecting ourselves from this dangerous and real evil. I grabbed a sleeping bag and a flashlight and read my Bible and prayed in terror under the pool table until it seemed all the trick-or-treaters had gone back to their homes.
Now, I don't pretend to think that the 1980s were a time governed by good sense and health on the whole. Consumerism was rampant, New Coke happened, and some of those children's cartoons in question were actually very scary with strange themes and, for some reason, scantily clad extremely muscular women and men. But many of the cartoons and toys were innocuous and fun and children played and connected over them because it was their shared culture. I spent a lot of my childhood frightened and alone because of severe restrictions and a constant stream of warnings about Satanic influence. Honestly, it seemed like the Christians that I was around at the time believed more in the omnipresence and power of Satan than they did in the power of God.
I wish I'd had the exact physical copy of this book that tainted my childhood that I could rip and mark. But, alas, I had to rely on photos from the internet. I was able to find pretty much the same schpeel about Halloween that was given to me as a child on Focus on the Family's website, tempered ever so slightly for current sensibilities. Reading this garbage nonsense was really kind of awful at times. At other times, it was cathartic to show that this book was totally bananas. It is difficult to explain the different experiences that I had as a child to people who had relatively normal childhoods.
I chose the black paper because of how all of this normal kid stuff was presented as dangerous and evil and because it gave me the option of writing on the paper with white as if it were a chalkboard à la Bart Simpson, or à la younger me in my Assemblies of God grade school. This was a meaningful exercise because it expressed this message that I had internalized, that I needed to be ever vigilant and do things or avoid doing things that would put me in danger of demonic or Satanic attack. I always had this sense that things that I wanted to do were somehow really bad when they were just normal kid things that my peers were enjoying, mostly without harm.
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