When I was a child, the excitement I felt when it was Halloween was truly overwhelming. There was the trick-or-treating, the costumes, the candy, what else could a kid have asked for?
I mean nothing beat the times you spent rummaging through Party City for the perfect costume. Nothing beat the thrill of taking all the candy left outside in a bowl labeled “please take one.” And really nothing beat the long hours you spent sorting through your stocked pillowcase at the end of a successful Halloween night. Yup, those were the days. Let the childhood nostalgia sink in.
Unfortunately, the meaning of my favorite holiday changed dramatically when I entered high school. Suddenly, all of the things that made Halloween so special in the past were now considered immature, a characteristic detrimental to every girl during their too-cool-for-school adolescent years.
I soon learned that trick-or-treating was for children and that eating excessive amounts of candy would make you fat. I noticed the discernable change in the costumes my friends and I started to wear. One day I was dressed as a fairy princess and the next I was forcibly wearing a corset and bunny ears.
But a lot’s changed since my first high school Halloween. I’ve grown out of my awkward teenage years in hope that the social insecurities of adolescence wouldn’t follow me to college. Who was going to stop me if I wanted celebrate Halloween in college the way I did when I was a kid? I could do whatever I wanted to. I didn’t care what people thought about me, right? I’d wear a ridiculous costume, trick-or-treat from dorm to dorm, and collect as much candy as I could find…. it all sounded so great in my head.
But no, college brought quite the opposite. It meant less candy, less clothes, and more partying, nothing like the Halloweens I experienced in the past and certainly nothing like the Halloweens I looked to experience in the future. I may have been out of high school, but the social pressures I once felt still held true. This is how we celebrated Halloween in college. This was life.
Much like Cady Heron, I realized that as we got older, the further away we’d inevitably be from the Halloweens of our youth. Halloween as I once knew it turned from an innocent, candy-filled celebration into a raging, drunken slut fest. And there was nothing I could do to stop it. I guess nowadays, college students are more satisfied by taking shots and dartying than they are by wearing costumes and eating candy. I miss Halloween. I miss what it used to be.
Growing up certainly rips away the innocence of Halloween. Why does being an adult mean we can’t entertain our childlike tendencies? I still like candy, I still like to dress up, and I can’t imagine that trick-or-treating is any less fun when you’re twenty.