Halloween!

It’s no secret to those who know me well that I adore Halloween. It’s my favorite holiday – which is probably odd since I don’t particularly like creepy, scary things. What I love about Halloween is the element of control. You can generally choose your own costume (within parental parameters), and then you proceed to travel around to various houses whereby simply knocking on the door and saying “Trick or Treat” gets you candy. Then you get to go back to your house and eat it all until you make yourself sick. In all of this, you have more control than say Christmas where you have to ask Santa for things and then labor under intense surveillance for a period of time, and no matter how well you pass these tests, the things on your list might not materialize. Halloween is an instant gratification, sugar-high holiday where you don’t have to be yourself, or some version of a perfect angel. You can be a rebel-rousing hellion and it’s okay. In fact, it’s rewarded!

Perhaps it was my inability to rebel much as a youth that fostered my love of Halloween. When you do crazy things on Halloween, it doesn’t matter because everyone else is doing crazy things. Every other holiday is about doing things to please other people to create the eventual reward (don’t get me started on Valentine’s day and its traumatizing effects on my psyche with relation to popularity), but Halloween is that one space where you make the rules and no one can stop you.