Halloween can be a fun and exciting holiday, but only if you celebrate it. The tradition of trick-or-treating may seem to only be for children, but that is not true. Everyone should be able, and willing, to dress up on Halloween.
Do you remember dressing up and going around your neighborhood as a child, all in order to get free candy? The free candy was a great reward then, but it may not be as effective now that we are adults. However, the spirit of Halloween remains with us, and it allows us to let our imagination and inner passions come alive once a year and manifest themselves within our costumes.
Now, what is stopping us from actually participating in Halloween’s spooky festivities? It may be class, a job or a lack of ambition. However, these reasons are not excuses to avoid joining with other people by failing to masquerade yourself according the annual tradition. This holiday, like most others, is a time for people to celebrate. It is supposed to fun and exciting, and not participating only hurts those who fail to partake in the spirit of the holiday.
Of course, there are many other activities with which to amuse yourself. You can carve a pumpkin, decorate your room or visit a haunted house. These activities, though, do not allow much room for a skilled person to express themselves. A costume, on the other hand, can transform a person’s identity into something different, unknown, strange or scary.
Halloween was originally a celebration of a year’s successful harvest. It gave people a chance to get together and celebrate a good job on their part. Today, farming is a detached operation from most of us, and we don’t often celebrate a successful harvest within our families. We still have the ability, nonetheless, to partake in grand parties. A costume party is still fun for all ages, even if what happens at those parties changes with the age of the partiers. And what is more fun than mingling with people dressed up, acting as someone else and having a great time together? The only people left out of that fun are the people who did not take the time or effort to creatively express themselves via donning a costume, tailored to their particular idea of whom they want to portray for a single evening.
As for myself, I plan on dressing up as a character from my favorite PC game. I plan on doing this in order to convey to the public who I am, what I enjoy and that they should be wary of judging based on appearances. As for what I will be running around as, you will have to find me in order to find out; perhaps I will be punching wood in the Quad or trying to mine stone from the sidewalks and buildings around campus. Of course, this is all fun and games, and I allow myself the one day per year to act completely out of the ordinary.
Of course, you can stay in your room all day, and miss out on the creativity, parties, candy and the vast amount of fun and foolishness occurring on Halloween. This holiday has its origins as a celebration of a good harvest, but it still means that we can have a party. How else are we to ward off the evil spirits that are trying to ruin our good harvest? Sit in front of a computer, texting our friends? No, by showing them what a creative group of people we can be, and what fun we can have while being creative.
