Is Halloween the best night of the year – or tedious, obligatory costume chaos?
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Version 0 of 1. Molly Weingart, Halloween lover No bones about it, Halloween is really the best, for lots of reasons. First, I love costumes. The chance to be anyone or anything, and to see what that anyone or anything is for other people, never ceases to amuse and amaze me. Yes, that does often mean seeing people dressed as a sexy _______, but it’s a delight to see adults walk down the street with wings, tails, swords and wigs. For the record, this year, I’m going as a shooting star. Last year, I was “aloof”, and then before that, I was Mary Poppins. Costumes aside, it’s possible that I’m biased toward Halloween because I have spent Halloween with some of the most meaningful people in my life (or at least met them on that day). I met one of my best friends, Carmen, on Halloween during my freshman year of college; she was some kind of Egyptian royalty and I was dressed as a Smurf. Immediately, there was a shared understanding between us, an “I can be all sides of myself with you, even if they are blue”. We still travel the world and try to spend any Halloween we can together. There’s also the thrill of Halloween romance. It is one thing for your friend to get kissed at a party; it is another when she is kissed by a gladiator at a party. (This really happened to a friend, not me.) And then there’s the pinnacle of passion: the couple’s costume. How cool is it that you’ve found someone who appreciates your private jokes and strange habits who is even willing to be the Luke to your Leia or the Beauty to your Beast in public? It’s so cool – don’t try to pretend it’s not. In the midst of the glitz, glam, horror and humor, Halloween is one of the few holidays where you get to cut up a plant, make a mess all over your kitchen, roast the seeds and stick a candle in it. Don’t underestimate the satisfaction of creating a lantern by removing pumpkin goop. I could go on, but really all of this boils (toils and troubles) down to the fact that I love Halloween because it is a holiday that is simply meant for fun. It is a chance for dress up, creativity and to just believe, for just a moment, the unbelievable. Kira Goldenberg, on the fence Halloween tends to inspire fervent love or visceral disdain, but I prefer not to take a side. When everyone else is costumed this year, I’ll be wearing the track pants and tank top that comprise my weekend uniform. Maybe it’s because I’m repressed, but I’m not a costume person. Thankfully, I’m also not a peer-pressure person: I will be the one at the Halloween party dressed up as myself, and I will not be ashamed. Nobody will even notice a few rounds in. Nonetheless, I love being surrounded by adults in all manner of face paint, corseting and neon spandex, because it’s always accompanied by a delightful liberated glee that comes from people letting their ids run rampant, a sort of modern-day version of Carnival, the pre-Lent festival where, among other festivities, serfs and their manor lords swapped roles for the former to let off steam. The point then, though, was ultimately to uphold the existing social order through brief choreographed chaos, not a sort of feudalist “Free to be You and Me”. So it follows that kitty ears and bondagewear and furry costumes should be acceptable not one day, but every day, rather than solely at organized events. Down with the artifice of business casual – that’s the real “costume”. Instead, every day should be Halloween, and everyone’s taste and preferences destigmatized, a plan sans downsides unless you’re a middle-aged man who wants to spend his days in a Tinky-Winky costume talking to strangers’ kids, no longer constrained by the expectation to wear Brooks Brothers. In which case, I’d say that it’s still better for the rest of us to know that you’re that guy. A glittery new norm would also conveniently do away with the need for our annual Halloween parade – that New York nightmare during which the streets are flooded with hordes of drunken jerks in costume who’d be better off not blocking my intended walking route. If people could wear costumes every day, their Halloween get-ups wouldn’t be worth special attention. And if you hate costumes – or have Halloween performance anxiety – endless Halloween would take the social judgment out of costume selection (and maybe even save American Apparel, though I don’t necessarily endorse that collateral result). Kids allowed to wear their Ninja Turtle costumes daily would lose the impetus for trick or treating, but candy windfalls shouldn’t be confined to 31 October, either – which is perhaps the best reason of all to free Halloween from only lasting one night. Adam Gabbatt, Halloween hater When I was a child in the north of England, I would dress up on Halloween, which consisted of wearing a plastic mask, some rubber fingers with bloody claws on the end and maybe a cape. Then we’d go out and get a load of candy. Doing that was fun, because I was a child. When I got older, I left Halloween behind. I would smile fondly at children going trick or treating on 31 October. It was cute; they were having fun. They were children. But now, Halloween has become something in which you can’t avoid participating, even as an adult. It looms large for weeks before the actual date and, as soon as October begins, the pressure mounts: What are you going as for Halloween? Where are you going for Halloween? Don’t you just love Halloween? I always want to answer “nothing”, “nowhere” and “no”. Halloween sucks; it is the very definition of forced fun. There’s a misguided idea that by dressing up – by participating – you are therefore having A Good Time. But are you really having fun? Are you enjoying yourself as you sweat inside a Barney costume? As you struggle to pour beer through a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles face mask? As you squeeze through a crowded bar, dressed as a boiled egg? Halloween is like being forced to participate in some party game at spring break or frosh week. You don’t want to stand in front of a crowd of people and down that shot of tabasco, and you aren’t really being forced to. But if you don’t do it, you aren’t fun. You’re a party pooper. On Halloween, similarly, I don’t want to dress up. I don’t like it. I want it to go away and leave me alone. But there is no escaping Halloween. Around the end of October every social invitation will be related to it and, if you go to a party in your normal clothes, you don’t fit in, you aren’t part of the gang, and you take yourself too seriously. So instead I always end up in a last-minute, hate-fuelled search for an outfit; I rifle through the Halloween aisle at Family Dollar; I search through my closet for any clothes that might befit a particular costume. Or, maybe I strip the bed, cut two eyeholes in my (frankly) off-white sheet, and throw it over my head. There. I’m a ghost. Are you happy now? |