RSSA Curmudgeonly Confession
October 13th, 2007 | View Comments
I love fall, with its cooling weather and changing colors. I love busting out my knitted sweaters and hats, scarves, and gloves, and my giant 100% wool knitted blanket that keeps me toasty warm. When I was an undergrad, fall meant extended weekends raking leaves as a fundraiser for my favorite charity. Not so fun getting up at 7am to go rake someone else’s yard, but at the end you feel productive and happy and like you did something good for humanity.
I love fall, except for one thing. Halloween. I hate Halloween.
Well, hate is a strong word. It’s not like I can’t enjoy Halloween and it’s fine if other people love the holiday. Some years I dress up and have fun and some years, like this one, I completely can’t get into the spirit of things and wish Halloween would go away already.
I don’t really mind the costumes, and often find them the most fun part of Halloween. I like seeing what other people are wearing and think that some of the ideas that people come up with are fantastic. But I don’t get a lot of enjoyment from dressing up myself (I learned to associate costumes with high stress during my years of dance and theatre), and I really don’t like spending money buying pieces I wouldn’t normally buy and most likely pieces that I’m only going to wear once, especially when I’m trying to save money.
I’m not really a candy person, either. My body has a low tolerance for sugary things so I can’t get into the candy gluttony (if we could Trick-or-Treat for say, pizza and wings, I would be all over that). I find candy corn to be one of the most disgusting things ever manufactured. But I do like handing candy out to little kids in costumes. Especially the littlest ones, who seem so amazed that “Trick or Treat” will make a bite-sized Snickers fall out of the sky.
I am the exact opposite of an adrenaline junkie and I hate being scared. I am most definitely not going to pay money to give someone the privilege of making me all jumpy for the rest of the night.
It does bug me that Halloween stuff starts appearing in stores in like, August (with Christmas stuff now appearing in September, good grief). Although there are religious roots to the holiday, the modern American conception of it is largely driven by the motivation to sell more plastic orange pumpkins. And to get raging drunk and start riots on State St. And in the case of women, the opportunity to dress like a slut and call it a costume.
But what bugs me most is that even though this is a pretty meaningless holiday, people feel entitled to harass you if frankly, you would rather sit this one out.
Yvonne posted this on October 13th, 2007 @ 2:48pm in Miscellaneous | Permalink to "A Curmudgeonly Confession"
Discussion
3 Comments
Keep track of the discussion! Subscribe to this post's RSS feed.
Have something to say? Leave your own comment!
| Trackback |
2. Peter » October 14th, 2007 at 2:40 am
Liar, liar. You ate a whole bunch of chocolate while at home. And you’re making me mail stuff to you for your Halloween costume.
You’re so busted.
3. Yvonne » October 14th, 2007 at 11:49 am
1) It was dark chocolate, which is not very sweet. I also ate the equivalent of 10 Hershey kiss-sized pieces. I do confess to a weakness for chocolate chip cookies, though. But for reference, at a baby shower recently, I ate: 1 small scoop of sorbet, 1 Rice Krispy treat, and 1 peanut butter cookie and I thought I was going to vomit.
2) This is so the Halloween-o-philes will get off my back for less than $10 and zero of my own effort. 
My original plan was to show up wearing regular clothes, carrying a broom from my house, and call myself a Quidditch player.
1. Jane » October 13th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
or… you can do what my husband did last year for costume. he wrapped a bath towel over his head and threw another one over himself, toga-style, and called himself “bath towel man”. yes, we did open the door to trick or treaters with him dressed like that.