If you’re saying you didn’t love Halloween as a child, you’re probably lying. Spending hours at the local Halloween store picking out the perfect costume, running through the streets trick-or-treating, and trading sweets with your friends to ensure that you had an ample supply of your favorites to hold you over until next Halloween. What’s not to love?! Our biggest responsibility was deciding what type of bag would be the cutest (and most efficient) for hauling around the 45 pounds of candy that we’d soon have. I personally always opted for the biggest bag that I could find, but maybe that was just me.
I know, I’m sorry, you’re now all sadly reminiscing on the long-gone, care-free days of binge eating candy. It was all fun and games at the time, but now you’re in college. You have responsibilities like 10-page papers and cleaning your dorm room among the other 1,865 things flooding your calendar. Halloween might be the last thing on your mind right now, but trust me, there are a ton of ways to enjoy the festivities of the holiday in an easier, more mature way while away at college.
First of all, just because you don’t want to spend $60 on that costume set from Party City doesn’t mean you can’t dress up. Creating a trendy costume from what you have can be easier than you might think. Throw on your cutest black crop top with a matching black skirt and dig up those old mouse ears you kept from the time you visited Disney World in the third grade. Put it together and you have an easy, cute, and economically efficient costume that you’ve created in under five minutes. In the wise words of Karen Smith, “I’m a mouse, duh.”
Although you might feel that you’ve outgrown the ability to trick-or-treat, you can still treat yourself in honor of the holiday. Maybe you can’t eat the same amount of Kit-Kats you used to be able to eat in one sitting as an 8-year-old, but a smaller indulgence might do the trick. A Hershey bar, an extra cookie from the dining hall, or even extra brownie bites on top of your favorite fro-yo. Anything that’s sweet enough to remind you of the holiday while hopefully sparing you the stomach ache typically brought on by eating pounds of candy.
Yes, I understand that you might not have the same old front yard you used to decorate with fake spiderwebs and carved pumpkins, but that doesn’t mean you can’t show off your Halloween spirit to those around you. Draw a pumpkin on the whiteboard outside your dorm room door, hang up orange string lights above your bed, or cut out a couple of paper witch hats and stick them on your wall. Anything that screams Halloween will bring the same smile to your face as your old, hometown decorations would.
While it may be different from the Halloween you experienced as a kid, it can still be a time worth celebrating, even if you’re doing it in a more “adult” way. So put on that mouse costume, hype up the decorations, and go treat yourself to that extra cookie. It’s still Halloween whether you’re 8 or 18, so enjoy it in the best ways possible.
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