Dan DaranciangAfter this past weekend, it might be difficult to comprehend that Halloween wasn’t always about excessive drinking and barely-there costumes, or getting intoxicated enough to forget how little you actually are wearing.
Not that there’s anything wrong with what college does to Halloween, but when you’re throwing up from drinking too much, you have to admit you’d trade it in a heartbeat for throwing up from eating too much candy.
Whether Halloween played a major role in your childhood, or you just miss the fact that candy wasn’t detrimental to your diet back then, everyone suffers from at least a little nostalgia at this time of year.
Back then, costumes might not have gotten us laid, but they sure scored us some brownie points.
At my elementary school, we had a parade every year. And there was nothing like hearing “oohs” and “ahhs” from the parents when we walked by-my jack-in-the-box costume in kindergarten, Statue of Liberty costume in second grade and old lady costume in fifth grade (to name a few) wowed the whole community. And as you might guess from that list, I barely had to show any skin.
Sophomore Stephanie Purisch said that she and her friend dressed up as “morning women” for two years in a row.
“We wore PJs and robes and our hair in curlers and carried coffee mugs,” she said. “Everyone in the neighborhood loved it.”
Of course, Halloween was about more than just the costumes. It was about raking the leaves, playing in them and then re-raking them into those big orange garbage bags that looked like pumpkins. It was about carnivals and hayrides. It was about Affy Tapples-which have a totally different meaning than taffy apples. It was about the family trips to pick out the perfect pumpkins and then going home to carve them. Purisch said her family even had a “pattern book” they used when they carved their pumpkins.
More than anything else, Halloween was about trick-or-treating and all that it entailed over the years.
For the first chunk of youth, trick-or-treating means one thing: candy. Rain or shine (in my case, almost always rain), we made it around the blocks that, after years of research and experimentation, proved to have the cream of the crop.
A woman I knew only as “the candy lady” for the better part of my childhood lived a few blocks away from me. No treat has ever compared to what she put in those plastic pumpkin buckets everyone carried around. She passed out bags of homemade, gourmet, chocolate-covered everything you can imagine. Traffic on that block on Halloween could have competed with rush hour traffic in any major city.
Candy trading was intense back then, and you had to be pretty manipulative to get what you wanted. I don’t remember a single year before high school when my candy trading practices didn’t turn into friendship-altering fights.
Beyond the candy trading and the actual candy getting, trick-or-treating where I grew up was about something else: shaving cream and silly string fights.
There was one street that was infamous for its shaving cream fights on Halloween. When I was younger, we went there to watch all of the cool older kids rub shaving cream and squirt silly string all over each other.
So, if things like pumpkins, shaving cream and candy still exist today, why aren’t our Halloweens just like they used to be?
Maybe people feel they’re too mature or too old for jumping in piles of leaves and knocking on people’s doors to ask for treats. It is kind of a disturbing concept when you think of it like that.
And while I highly recommend continuing the traditions of buying and carving pumpkins and playing in the leaves during this season, the whole candy and trick-or-treating thing might have transformed permanently.
Many college students’ diets don’t quite allow excessive candy consumption. But beyond that, we have crossed over to other side: we’re the givers now.
The dorms sponsor the Safe Trick-or-Treat program, which entails sitting in your room with candy for the local children who come knocking.
And when we’re the knockers at this age, we’re usually knocking to ask for donations for charity, rather than our overfed stomachs and sugar highs. Tonight, for instance, between 7:00 and 9:00 p.m., the girls of AEPhi will be trick-or-treating for donations to the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation.
So try to get into the Halloween spirit tonight-whatever that means for you. Give money. Shove your face with candy. Carve a pumpkin. Play in the leaves. Attack your friends with shaving cream and silly string.
No one’s too cool for this holiday.