It’s finally November and we’ve begun to recover from the Halloween festivities. Pumpkins are sitting outside, starting to melt (at least, that’s what it looks like they’re doing), candy is half off at Walmart, and there are remnants of costumes lying around campus, dropped in the frenzy and never to be picked up again. But here’s my unpopular opinion: I don’t really like Halloween. Now, before you come at me with your torches and pitchforks, ready to carry me off the Halloweentown, hear me out.
It’s stressful.
Halloween is stressful for people like me who are not quite as creative as we would like. Coming up with clever costume ideas is hard. My family rotated through the usual costumes—witches, clowns, cartoon characters, vampires, etc.—and we got stressed out just coming up with that! Spending time making the costume perfect is hard, too. Why would I spend two hours every night perfecting a costume that will only be worn once and will most likely have something spilled on it by the end of the night? That time could be spent doing important things, like writing papers. “But Sarah!” you say. “We saw you dressed up as an old lady for Halloween this year! You can’t tell us you don’t like dressing up!” You did, indeed, see me dressed up as an old lady, but I can tell you right now that while it was fun for a brief time, it is definitely not how I would choose to usually spend a weekend.
It can be very expensive.
Not only is the candy that you have to buy to give out to the trick-or-treaters expensive, but costumes can be expensive, too. Even if you’re making your own costume, you’ll have to buy supplies for it. Forget the poorly made, pre-packaged costumes that cost more than I’d like to spend on a regular shirt. And then there are the decorations, which can range from the tastefully carved Jack-O-lanterns and ears of Indian corn to fake corpses and plastic tombstones, complete with a psychedelic light show. Honestly, I’d rather spend my money on food.
There really aren’t many good Halloween movies.
I wholly recognize that I might be run out of town for this, but I really don’t think that Halloween has anything on Christmas when it comes to movie selection. Hocus Pocus is definitely the best Halloween movie out there, but I honestly can’t think of any others that I genuinely enjoy watching. The Halloweentown franchise would be good if there was some continuity of cast and The Nightmare Before Christmas is great if Tim Burton is your thing, but I personally don’t enjoy either of those. The other issue is that those are literally the only Halloween movies that I can think of off the top of my head, so if there are more, they can’t be very good.
There’s no real aspect of family on Halloween.
For me, this is the biggest reason why I’m not super psyched for Halloween. Most major holidays have the important aspect of family. There’s nothing I love more than sitting down to a meal with my entire family and just laughing the whole time and Halloween doesn’t have that. When I was little, the objective of Halloween was to get as much candy as you could possibly carry and I remember getting very impatient when my parents wanted to walk together instead of letting me run from house to house. I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with Halloween, but I think there is more value to holidays where family is emphasized and spending time together is the purpose.
I don’t know if you guys are still planning to come at me with your mob equipment, but there it is. I mean no disrespect to those who love Halloween, only that I think the holiday is overrated.
Image credits: NextShark, Sarah Lloyd, Wikipedia, Guff, Flickr