I think I can safely say that fall is the best season of them all. Who doesn’t love football season, fall colors, sweater weather, hayrides, corn mazes, and pumpkin pie (or pumpkin anything really)? The weather perfectly toes the line between the blazing heat of summer and the bitterly cold winter. As an added bonus, I’m an October baby so the fall season has even more for me to look forward to.
What’s not to like?
Halloween.
Halloween is the one and only detestable thing about the fall. I’m much more of a Thanksgiving person. In my opinion, Thanksgiving is the most underrated holiday and Halloween is the most overrated. As soon as the last traces of summer weather have disappeared, the Halloween memes appear in full force, but where is the same love for Thanksgiving???
What is it that I hate so much about Halloween? Is it the costumes? Surprisingly, no. I may be a Halloween hater but I love a good theme party. To some of you this might make absolutely no sense. Isn’t Halloween just an excuse to dress up in whatever theme you like? Not really.
Think of it like this:
I absolutely hate it when a professor assigns a paper with no directions whatsoever like it’s a gift. “You can do whatever you like! In whatever format you want!” LIES! You would totally give me a zero if I wrote a personal reflection about the plight of goats in Siberia so you CLEARLY have preferences that you have chosen not to share with the class. How am I supposed to write a paper that will meet your expectations with no directions? I am not a creative type. I greatly appreciate some instructions so that if I totally miss the mark at least I will know the reason why.
Theme parties are like assignments that have guidelines. Halloween is a chaotic free-for-all.
Theme parties give directions but can be open to interpretation. There is room for creativity! Also, you won’t have to spend your entire night explaining an obscure costume to people who just don’t share the same love of that one actor in that one indie film that played that extremely normal person wearing a vintage jacket. No one likes these people, but unfortunately they tend to crawl out of the woodwork for Halloween. No such nonsense occurs at theme parties.
Another strike against Halloween is the pressure to find a costume that is relevant, easily recognizable, funny, original, not too slutty, yet appropriate for going out, clever, inexpensive, and feasible with the materials you have at your disposal. In other words, impossible. Which is probably why I have been something resembling a black cat for the past five Halloweens. A sad, overused trope of a costume that is neither clever nor the least bit funny.
But group costumes are easy, right? Wrong. Group costumes at Halloween are always more complicated than they have any right to be. If you’re not in a group costume, you always wonder if you should be. If you are doing a group costume, do you have to stay together for the entire night for the costume to make sense? Are there only a certain number of people the group can accommodate? They pose an endless number of problems for the often delicate and fragile web of female friendships. On the other hand, theme parties are like an unlimited group costume without any complications.
My intense dislike of Halloween might stem from my obsessive desire to do things EXACTLY RIGHT (which probably makes me a lame rule-follower) but I know there are other Halloween haters out there, and come October 31 we will dutifully don our worn black cat ears and brave the chaos.
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