Do Jews celebrate Valentine’s Day and Halloween? These holidays have Christian roots. If celebrating the fun secular parts of Halloween and Valentine’s Day isn’t frowned upon, why is it so bad to celebrate the fun secular parts of Christmas or Easter?
Halloween is a Celtic festival. It’s a great community event and a fun time. I love Halloween, its secular Purim!
I don’t celebrate Valentine’s day beyond eating chocolates I buy for myself. Not only does the Christian connection bother me, but I find the common practice of shoving all your romance for the year into a single day to be distasteful and shallow.
Although I don’t know anyone who actually celebrates it, there’s also Tu B'Av.
While I know this isn’t as common as I believed growing up, a lot of Jewish families (including mine) do frown upon celebrating the “fun secular parts” of Halloween and Valentine’s Day, because both of them were originally religious celebrations. @if-i-am-not-for-me is correct that Halloween originated as a Celtic festival and was only later made a Christian one, but the Celtic roots of the holiday are very much religious. I know pagans who currently celebrate it as one of the holiest days of the year.
In the spirit of neighborliness I will always keep candy on hand to give to trick-or-treaters if they come by my house on Halloween, same as my parents always did, but that’s the extent of what I do for either of those days.
(Unless you count going to buy half-price holiday chocolate the day after each, along with the day after Christmas and the day after Easter, those being the four days of what my friend @camwyn calls the Feast of St. Marked Down.)
