Besides the scary movies, free candy, and fun costumes, the nostalgia surrounding Halloween is what makes it so special. From a young age, Halloween was a special day where my sister and I could stay up a little later on a school night and hang out with our friends. The older I’ve gotten, the more I miss the memories of that one special night and how I celebrated it the same way each year.
Autumn was always my favorite time of year as my mother would decorate our apartment in red, orange, and gold. The outside of our apartment was adorned with faux pumpkins on the steps, lights in the windows, and cute scarecrow figurines near the entrance. Around the same time each year, the Party City costume catalog would arrive in the mail and I would spend hours flipping through it and circling the ones I liked, waiting for my father to come home from work. Needless to say, I would rarely buy a new costume seeing as they were quite pricey and would instead opt to re-wear previous costumes, DIY my own, or use a dance performance outfit in place.
My Halloween nostalgia breaks down into three main categories:
- Timeless Disney Channel movies and episodes.
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Unlike Christmas, where we have music to get us into the holiday mood, movies and TV shows serve as the best way to get into the spooky vibes of Halloween. Every other year, I spent mid-September decorating my dorm and watching scary movies on the weekends— my favorites being Insidious, Conjuring, and It. Yet the closer it gets to Halloween the more my media choices revert to earlier years. I choose to watch classic Disney Channel movies like Hocus Pocus, Halloweentown, and Twitches. Having grown up watching these movies and seeing them year after year just makes me excited, regardless of how many times I’ve seen the movies. Another thing that is fun to do is to watch episodes of classic Disney Channel shows that they would play during “Halloweek.” My personal favorite is the Suite Life of Zack and Cody episode where they tricked Zack into thinking there was a ghost in one of the hotel rooms. Watching it now, it’s almost silly to think about how scared I used to get, as the ghost was nowhere near real and the CGI was clearly fake.
- Reminiscing on memories.
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As I walk through campus with the wind whipping at the trees’ golden leaves and my hand around a warm Starbucks cup, I think about all the good memories the season brings to mind. Besides the amazing fashion fall time brings, this season is my favorite because of all the fond memories I have surrounding the season, specifically Halloween. Growing up, my neighborhood was known for being the perfect place to Trick-or-Treat, with a majority of the apartments and houses decorated and the sheer amount of kids who would roam the streets with their cute little costumes. Starting in the first grade, I went trick-or-treating with the same group of six kids and our favorite thing to do afterwards was to go back to someone’s apartment and trade candy. There is a multitude of pictures that our parents took over the years with us sitting around in a circle with our mounds of candy in front of us. When we were little, the trading was easy as we simply exchanged anything we didn’t like, but the older we got the more competitive we became and it was quite funny. Once high school hit, trick-or-treating became less of a priority for the six of us but Halloween did not become any less important. Year after year those memories became our favorite things to joke about with one another. Whether it was talking about that one year our neighbor hid in a pile of leaves and scared us, or the fact that our Filipino mothers always layered our cute costumes with thermals and jackets, Halloween has always been a holiday I could look back on and have a good laugh about.
- All the Halloween stories
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As the hype for Halloween builds up, it is always so much fun to exchange stories with friends. Though many of my Halloween experiences were similar, each year came with a slightly different story or costume fail. As a first-year in college, it has been so much fun learning about everyone’s favorite trick-or-treat memory. Getting to see the different ways your new friends celebrate the same holiday is a refreshing experience, yet it still holds the same special meaning to each person. Whether it’s learning about someone’s favorite group costume, haunted house experience, or even their favorite hometown fall festival, it’s always a great conversation to have with friends.
All in all, Halloween is such an amazing time of year. Not only is it great in the present, but it’s also a holiday that leaves lasting memories.