Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. It’s not just the scary movies, the haunted houses, the crisp fall weather, the pumpkin pies, the apple cider, the bonfires, the haunted corn mazes, and the hayrides. What other holiday encourages, even requires, you to put on a crazy costume and get tons of treats (or perhaps more realistically for the average Hoya, a sloppy makeout with someone whom you think is the hot guy from your English class, though you can’t really be sure under his Dread Pirate Roberts Mask)? And no, Mardi Gras doesn’t count.
As I planned my Halloween costumes for this weekend, inevitably my thoughts turned nostalgically to the Halloweens of my past. Every Halloween growing up, the thing I looked forward to the most was candy. (And committing minor acts of vandalism. But mainly candy.) But now, as a Georgetown senior, it’s amazing to see how the holiday has evolved and grown up with us. How we celebrate holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas doesn’t really change as we grow older. But celebrating Halloween has a very distinct lifecycle.
Where before we went door-to-door trick-or-treating in our costumes, we now go to parties, or bar-to-bar for Halloween specials and themed drinks. We no longer carve pumpkins, but we buy them and hope (in vain) that they don’t get smashed by drunken marauders by the end of the weekend. We used to buy children’s costumes of action figures and Greek goddesses; now our costumes tend to involve even less fabric and far more irony. We watch movies like Saw and Paranormal Activity 3 instead of Hocus Pocus and Don’t Look Under the Bed.
Something has subtly and slowly changed from the Halloweens of our childhood to now. It’s not just the addition of alcohol and the sexualization of costumes to our Halloweens. The change lies in our fear.
We used to be afraid of monsters and witches, bumps in the dark and black cats crossing our paths. But our fears are no longer limited to the creepy crawlies and shadows lurking under our beds. We can no longer ensure our safety by simply pulling the bedsheets over us (if I can’t see them, they can’t see me!) or by throwing water on witches.
Our fears are more intangible, less the monster of our imagination and more the fears that accompany our daily existence. We’re worried about getting jobs, about our families, about violent crime and bad economies and devastating wars and a lot of other things that we used to be shielded from beneath the mask of childhood.
The older we became, the harder it was to believe in the monsters in the closet when the news on TV gave us plenty of real ones to choose from. At Halloween, we retreat from the terrors of the real world to indulge once again in the thrills and chills of our childhood, back when your fears were no match for the Superman “S” you sported on your chest.
What we were for Halloween was more than a costume—it was our identity for the night and we dared the scariness of the night. This in no way excuses me shooting my old neighbor with a bow and arrow when he jumped out and scared us. But honestly he should have known better than to mess with an eight-year-old, sugar-fueled Pocahontas.
No matter how old or jaded we become, there is still something about Halloween that never loses its magic. Our fears may have changed as we have grown older, but Halloween remains the one day a year when we entertain our superstitions, when we seek the adrenaline-fueled excitement of a good scare. We search out the shivers, the jangling nerves, and the heightened sense of danger that always seems to permeate the air on Halloween.
Halloween will always be a holiday where, for at least a few minutes, I’ll push away my rationality, my common sense, and my belief that there’s no such thing as ghosts, or the supernatural, or mischievous spirits. I think there’s a small part in all of us willing to trade the fear that everyday reality brings us for the delightful shiver down our spines from monsters and witches and black cats and a thousand other superstitions that seem possible on that most haunted of nights.
I’ll never get tired of seeing the little kids running around with their bags of candy, adorned in princess dresses or the latest superhero costumes. They still feel the spirit of the electric possibility of the otherworld on that night. Let them have their monsters and boogeymen, their witches’ potions and things that go bump in the night. Their monsters are still the figments of their imagination, and their magic is still strong enough to protect them.
I do not even know what you mean by “Mardi Gras doesn’t count.”