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The opinions expressed in this article are the writer’s own and do not reflect the views of Her Campus.
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Alabama chapter.

Halloween is a busy and fun time of the year. Everyone is scrambling to get costumes, buy candy, and watch Halloween movies. It’s an exciting time as kids, but is it overrated for college students?

Halloween is a holiday for kids to dress up and go trick or treating to get free candy in their neighborhoods. However, in college it’s not like that. It’s a week-long event and students only dress up to go out and hang out with friends. This year, Halloween is on a Sunday, and most students will most likely celebrate all the days leading up to it and potentially not even on actual Halloween. It defeats the traditional reasons for celebrating Halloween. 

Not only that, but they also spend hours upon hours trying to find the best costume to wear. Everyone wants to have the cutest original costumes and it takes a while to come up with one. College students are already so busy, and planning Halloween is one more thing to add to their plate.

However, if you take too long to figure it out, then everything is sold out online. When you go onto Amazon most items will arrive inconveniently by November 2nd. Not to mention that the Student Center also takes a while to process it, so you have to plan even more in advance. 

In college, students get outfits for any day they want to celebrate Halloween. Most students try and get a different one every day. The costume choices are also very repetitive, and nothing is truly original. Costumes can get expensive for only wearing them once. It’s not like you can wear a mermaid costume to your bio lab next week. Way too much money is spent during the Halloween season and it is unnecessary, especially for college students.

In college, there are many themed parties and events that people go to throughout the whole year. For sororities and fraternities, they have different date parties where there are different themes to dress up for. For example: country, rave, Christmas, Hawaiian, etc. There is always an event where someone can dress up, so Halloween is not that special.

As a child, the most important part of Halloween is the amount and type of candy you receive. Halloween magic has slowly faded as kids grow up and candy is less and less important. Nowadays students can easily go to Target to buy $5 bags of candy for themselves and don’t care about going around trick-or-treating. 

Halloween is still a fun time of the year. However, the overall holiday is mostly centered around children and not for students. College students are in the middle of changing from being little kids that dress up and trick or treat to parents that pass out the candy. The overall purpose of Halloween is overrated with everything that is put into it with the costumes, time, effort and money. That’s my opinion, but still go buy those Halloween costumes and celebrate this holiday!

Julia Blackstone is from Dallas, Texas and is a Junior at the University of Alabama. She is studying News Media with a concentration in Sports. In her free time she loves to hangout with friends and watch tv shows and sports events.