October 31st. All Saints Eve. Another Hallmark, or should I say Party City, holiday that pushes us to spend, spend, spend. A holiday where families spend exasperating hours carving pumpkins that just end up smashed in the road by intoxicated young adults. I haven’t always been this cynical about Halloween you know. My childhood was filled with the same excitement towards the holiday as my friends and classmates. Past costumes have included a bear, a bat, an age-appropriate flapper, a scarecrow and many other typical child outfits, though in hindsight I should have waited until 2020 to have been a bat. 

My mother, queen of the homemade costume, worked for days leading up to Halloween to make sure I had a costume that I enjoyed and that would assure the ooh’s and the ah’s from parents and teachers at the Halloween Parade just right down the road here at Canton’s elementary school. We should have seen my hatred for Halloween coming at some points, through my indecisiveness to decide on a costume, something that would leave my mom more irritated than the physical act of making my outfit. 

Sure, all kids eventually grow out of everything, but I grew right past the ‘no-opinion’ phase on Halloween, to believing this holiday should be completely dismantled. Though I don’t have an exact date on this switch, I believe high school really made me wonder why on Earth, we would spend money on an outfit that would be worn for one night each year. Of course, you can rummage through your closet so you don’t always have to buy separate pieces, but the culture of new is always pushed so heavily. I will not shy away from admitting that I do enjoy spending money, but spending it on clothes I will wear again seems to make more sense. Buying a pink sparkly skirt and matching shirt that get worn for roughly three hours doesn’t seem financially smart. Might I add, these costumes we spend hours obsessing over, are either worn in the dark outside or in the dark inside. For those in college, is anyone going to truly remember what you wore for those three hours in a frat house basement? The temporary compliments of “you look so good!” and “that’s such a great costume!” are typically one of those things you automatically say and forget every saying in the first place.Look, I understand that on some level, Halloween gives people the chance to dress-up and spend a night ‘not as themselves’ but isn’t that something worth discussing further? If there is such a desire for this, why not do it all year around? Mean Girls said it best, “But in the girl world, Halloween is the one time of year a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girl can say anything about it.” Well why don’t we behave like that all year round? Wouldn’t it make life more enjoyable if we could just all wear whatever we wanted, to whatever extent?