The excitement of Halloween doesn’t seem to wane as we get older, even if we’ve stopped inhaling massive amounts of candy and chocolate, and aren’t supposed to go trick or treating anymore. Halloween itself seems to change and grow up with us—we went from trick or treating to party hopping from one Halloween event to the next, from eating candy corn and Reese’s butter cups to drinking pumpkin ale and glow-in-the dark Jello shots. Regardless of the passing years, Halloween never stops being something we look forward to, even though it’s completely different to what it was in elementary school. The concept of the most essential part of Halloween—the costume—also seems to have changed.
As kids, we had a couple Halloween events to dress up for– the Halloween parade at school, trick or treating in your neighborhood, your friend’s Halloween slumber party. Thinking back at our childhood days, Halloween brings back memories of huge bowls of candy, our pillowcases full of candy that we would never finish, face paint—lots of face paint, witch costumes, and spider webs. Halloween in college seems to last a good six to seven days. We don’t go Halloween costume shopping with our mothers anymore—with good reason. In fact, the thought of bringing our little sister costume shopping already seems pretty unsettling.
As Cady Heron’s Halloween costume painfully showed us, something definitely changed at some point or the other. We went from witches in pointy hats and long black robes to witches in fishnets. What happened to those awkward and silly costumes? When did Alice in Wonderland and little Red Riding Hood decide to become sultry and seductive in their tight little outfits? For some reason, we still choose the same characters as the ones we chose when we were five. All that has changed is our execution of our outfits. I guess we’re all trying to adapt it to what’s “appropriate” for us at our time and place. Lets see what we deem appropriate in twenty years!