There is no non-religious holiday that is more fun than Halloween. It is a time for friends to play tricks and for children to enjoy treats, and if you’ve got a good spirit, you can still do both. It is a time that brings out the fun in everybody, good or evil.
Aside from loading up on discounted candy, Halloween is a celebration of the autumn season itself. In fact, the origins of Halloween are of an ancient pagan festival that celebrates the end of the harvest season. This is evident in today’s culture, where many harvest-related activities associated with Halloween are enjoyed. For example, now is the time that the harvested corn fields turn into mazes and the grocery stores line their entrances with huge crates of pumpkins from some harvested pumpkin patch.
Though Halloween is most certainly a fall festival, it is most revered as a time to pretend. It’s where one can don a costume and become anything in the world that he or she wants to be for a single night.
Consider dressing up for Halloween as a child. When you put on that costume and get ready to go out with your friends to trick-or-treat, you really became that character. You may have insisted that your father refer to you as Bruce when in that costume you were Batman or maintain to your friends that you were, in fact, a princess when you were dressed as Jasmine from “Aladdin.” For anyone to consider otherwise was a slap in the face, because at that point in time, you were not yourself but your costume.
In my own recollection, I was former Tennessee quarterback Heath Shuler, no doubt. Twice. Forget Oliver Casey, I was No. 21, and I was hammering the Alabama secondary with my 5-year-old arm and leaping 300-pound men on the scramble.
One year I was a Cherokee Indian and could hunt and navigate the woods like one, too. Another year I was Oddjob from the Nintendo 64’s “Goldeneye” game, and Bond was my “partner in crime” through the neighborhood, terrorizing other youth as we battled for international prominence.
Halloween gives us that same kind of opportunity today, even when we’re far beyond our childhood years. It is a chance to dress into something radical (probably much more radical than what your mother dressed you in) and become something so ridiculous for one party, one evening, one time out of the year.
Consider the way most ladies dress for Halloween. Even the most respectable of young women can find it in themselves to wear the most offensive (but appropriate for the occasion) costumes. It is an excuse to discount the universal ideal of feminine sophistication and to embody the Halloween spirit of not giving a candy bar about what anybody else thinks. And for that night, it’s acceptable.
This remains true for guys as well. Somewhere deep inside of us, we want to be some kind of masculine epitome. Whether it’s dressing up as Frank Sinatra or Tony Montana, a tatted-up biker or Eazy-E, a psycho clown killer or a box of Wheaties, there is something inherently manly about those costumes that appeal to us. It gives men a chance to embody the hero, villain, and essentially the man they can’t be in reality, thanks to college life.
Many people plan for Halloween far before Oct. 31, and when we find that perfect idea, we put forth a good deal of effort into making that costume the funniest, dirtiest and most captivating one at the party. That is the joy of Halloween.
It is more than a big costume party. It’s a chance for all of us to show the world, in a sense, who we are. Our costume is a reflection of our creativity and perhaps even a look at whom or what we dream of being. There is nothing more fun than human imagination, and Halloween is the materialism of our wild sides at their best … and worst.
— Oliver Casey is a junior in enterprise management. He can be reached at [email protected].
