It’s time to dress up like it’s 2016 again!
Halloween was once a sacred ritual. Never knowing what 31 October truthfully represented, nor ever questioning it, my sister and I dressed up in the utmost eccentric costumes and marched through our neighbourhood collecting mountainous piles of candy until dusk. In school, we’d dress up for the costume contest, and at bedtime, conjure up the scariest story to tell each other until one of us got too scared.
Today, years later, still unsure what Halloween really signifies, we dress up, though not quite as eccentrically. Rather than going door to door and screaming “trick or treat”, we sell-out tickets to the biggest club in town. The rituals have changed. The ‘we’ changed as well when we all grew up and everyone moved away from each other. Halloween ceased being sacred when our childhood ceased altogether.
Since this stark realisation, I took the time to learn what Halloween actually meant. In ancient traditions, it signified the end of summer and autumn and the beginning of the winter as well as a remembering of the dead. While whatever it is that we are dressing up for is quite far from the intended purpose of Halloween, I think, if done right, we are all still commemorating this day in some way or another. With every passing October and every new costume, I remember what Halloween used to feel like when my sister and I were kids. I remember my first ever costume, a pumpkin, and the last of my crazy costumes from a few years ago, Central Cee. Yes, unfortunately this did actually happen.
Halloween, to me, is like an album of my childhood memories. Every night before Halloween, the realisation that I was missing a part of my costume and my parents’ own realisation that it was going to be a long night of sewing and gluing costumes together. Every rock paper scissor shoot game between my sister and I when dividing up our candy after having trick-or-treated. It’s also every time that I had to explain my costume to fellow trick-or-treaters because my costumes were always far too eccentric to ever make any sense.
Now, every costume looks the same. We have grown to care more how we look to others and less about the tradition of dressing up. I, myself, am no stranger to this. I seem to have lost that carelessness that I had back when I put on Cench’s skinny ripped jeans, gold chains and backwards hat.
I think it’s about time we revived the traditions from childhood; the unconventional, ridiculous costumes, the telling of horror stories, and the genuine excitement without the stress of which club tickets we are buying before they all sell out – god forbid we don’t go to the club on Halloween. I think it’s important to remember that it matters not how you look but that you’re celebrating a day that mattered to your childhood self and celebrating it how your childhood self did.
