Every year on Oct.1, I know I’m not the only one who immediately fantasizes about all the pumpkin and bat-shaped chocolates that will soon cover the isles of CVS. Part of the reason why I (and many others) look forward to spooky season so much is because of the nostalgic joy that Halloween carries for so many.
While many college students still remember the cozy, scary and exciting feelings of being a child on Halloween, the origins of this excitement likely stem from our memories of dressing up in cheesy costumes and roaming around dark neighborhood streets yelling “trick-or-treat!” with all of our elementary-aged friends. But how old is too old to go Trick-or-Treating?
When does it get humiliating? There’s a fine line between one more year of trying to collect as many Snickers bars as possible and retreating to watch scary movies after walking past a group of four-year-olds also trick-or-treating. Now, October is mostly about the Halloween parties, dressing up in a flirty little costume that probably looks nothing like the original character and watching horror movies well into the late hours of the night with our college roommates — but the candy will always be essential to Halloween.
I stopped going trick-or-treating in the eighth grade. Even then, I think my friends and I knew we were too old for it, so we treated it as a joke and collected candy for about 30 minutes before going back to someone’s basement to watch “Impractical Jokers.” That night, I wore a fuzzy “Pajanimals” one-piece that looked like a baby deer, and once we got back to my friend’s house, I unzipped it to reveal a cute black cat costume that I wore for the rest of the night.
One of my friends, Paige Hochadel, said the eighth grade was also her last year of trick-or-treating.
“I was Eeyore in a onesie, so definitely very childhood-coded,” she said. “I kind of liked when I stopped [trick-or-treating] just because I started to get more into horror movies and stuff, so I would just do that on Halloween instead of trick-or-treating.”
The fuzzy animal onesies served as a good transitional costume, a cute and comfy way to still dress up without fully committing to a costume on the night of Halloween.
Another friend of mine, Luna Schulke, says she stopped in her freshman year of high school.
“I want to say like after freshman year, no one I knew really trick-or-treated,” she said. “But I also would say quarantine affected that, because that was when COVID had hit and so it was kind of a scary time because we didn’t know what was going to happen and all had to kind of keep our distance from each other.”
Luna said another reason she stopped after freshman year was because trick-or-treating has a childlike connotation to it.
“You don’t want to be seen as weird,” she said. “As you grow older, it’s just not the thing you do anymore. You want to go out and party and hang out with people… but I do still want to go out and dress up.”
Finally, I asked my dad about his trick-or-treating days as a kid. He said he stopped going at the age of 11, but wishes he kept going for a few more years. Despite that, he says Halloween remains his favorite holiday. He also talked about how much creepier Halloween costumes used to be in the 1970s and 80s, joking about how costumes back then would likely have consisted of an everyday outfit with an extremely spooky-looking mask.
As the youngest child, my dad admits he stopped going trick-or-treating at a relatively young age, suggesting that sibling relationships may play a part; my friend Luna and I, both the oldest children of our families, stopped trick-or-treating around the ages of 13 and 14, but my dad (who has two older siblings) and my two younger sisters stopped closer to the ages of 11 and 12.
In general, the pattern among most people I talked to has been that with the end of middle school also comes the end of trick-or-treating. While it may be sad to say goodbye to such a cherished childhood memory, my college friends and I all still love dressing up on the night of Oct 31, going to Halloween parties and watching horror movies while stuffing our faces with the candy we bought from CVS.