Admissions Blog: Aly

November 2, 2009

Happy Halloween

I remember when becoming too old to trick-or-treat was my biggest fear. As far as childhood fantasies go, trick-or-treating was the easiest to hold on to because it didn’t require belief in a mythical character (instead it required you to embrace said mythical characters and dress up as if you actual were one!) My belief in the tooth fairy died first, at around age eight, and Santa Claus was thrown under the bus soon afterward. But Halloween! You didn’t have to believe in anything to take candy from strangers on that one miraculous night of the year. Yes, those were the good ol’ days (back when Pluto was a planet—a concept that my seventh graders sadly do not understand). Now I’ve reached another crossroads in the way that I celebrate pagan holidays: last night was the last Halloween that I’ll celebrate as a college student.

Granted, I will probably still celebrate Halloween the same way for at least a few more years because there aren’t many different ways to celebrate outside of throwing/attending a Halloween party (unless you count taking your children trick-or-treating, which I hopefully will not have to do for years to come) but the preparation will be different. I won’t spend the week before-hand studying furiously only to realize that I’ve forgotten to plan a Halloween costume until three days before. I won’t spend three hours researching ideas at work (time spent at work has never gone so quickly) and then end up with three costumes when a week ago I had none. And finally, I won’t be able to get ready with all my friends at my house, trading clothes and accessories and make-up until the perfect combination has been attained and hundreds of pictures have been taken.

The theme for this Halloween: convenience. Meaning: it’s more convenient if I have all the parts of my costume and don’t have to buy anything because it’s inconvenient to be broke. So this year, I went as Waldo and it only cost me $7 for a striped shirt. (Would you believe that they literally do not sell red and white striped shirts anywhere at any time that is not Christmas? I had to settle for dark orange and white stripes.) I already had blue pants, brown shoes, a hat, an old-fashioned camera with a neck strap, a knapsack, and glasses. True, my blue pants were actually jeans, my brown shoes were not hiking boots, my hat was the wrong color, my camera had no film in it, my knapsack was a backpack and my glasses were the wrong style frames, but people still knew who I was. (For the most part.) But that’s not really the point. The point is that after four years in college, after stressing over fancy costumes and impossible-to-find accessories that will inevitably end in me going as the same thing I went as the year before, Halloween is less about having the perfect costume and more about the opportunity to become someone else, even if it’s just for a night. Everyone needs a break once in awhile.