[By Luke Matys]
[Columnist]
With a due respect to Columbus Day, the most anticipated holiday in the college school year is upon us: Halloween! But Halloween for college kids is not a single day but rather a weekend extravaganza! There is always a buzz around college Halloween: the type of energy that if society could channel in a useful manner could cure Ebola and cancer, prevent global malnutrition/hunger, stop homelessness, gain equality, and start a foundation for the poor people who used to work for Blockbuster Video.
I work with kindergarteners two days a week because writing for the school newspaper was not charming enough. These five and six year olds are the only people on this planet more excited for Halloween. But their Halloween and our Halloween are two very different festivals of frightful merriment.
Yes we both dress up, but for very different reasons. Kindergarteners are dressing up to BE their costume at least for a night: a witch, a cowboy, batman, firefighter, or a nurse for instance. A lot of college students are not dressing up for the sake of dressing up, but rather because it is a theme of their drunken escapades that may lead to “something” (which I am totally okay with). Because of this we wear the “sexy” equivalent of all of these kindergarten costumes (ha, sexy batman is a good costume). Just a side note from a cool parent: it’s going to be cold Friday night so maybe your costume could be a sexy (fill in the black) with a sweater and boots.
Kindergarteners go out trick-or-treating in search of the candy that for months has been denied to them in the massive quantity of sugar that they deem worthy and necessary to their diet. As a college kid, we do not need to go trick-or-treating (not to mention that SOCIETY is denying us free candy). We have the ability to go to a store and obtain any giant bag of candy of our choosing. Kindergarteners would give up ANYTHING to have the ability to obtain bite-size blocks of sugar, even snack-time. College students don’t eat nearly as much Halloween candy as kindergarteners. The sweetest thing a college student consumes on Halloween might be a Smirnoff Ice.
Halloween is scary for kindergarteners. You have to approach random doors some of which are decorated in a way that is meant to scare you. Growing up, my least favorite house had a “grown-up” who was probably 16 at the time jump out of the buses with a fake knife in order to scare 6 year-olds like me. What a jerk. But fear has been taken out of the college Halloween experience for the most part: the exception may alcohol related security blotter worthy moments.
The biggest similarity between college kids and kindergarteners is the excitement and fun that is associated with it. Go out relive a treasured day of your youth from a new perspective! Halloween is all about joy no matter how you celebrate it. Happy Halloween!
No Spitting.