The Story of Halloween

No holiday changes with age like Halloween does. I have seen it evolve over the years and fall into three distinct stages.

1) The Early Years: Until the age of 12 or so, Halloween was always my favorite day of the year (birthdays were sweet but Halloween was better, and Santa doesn't come to the houses of people whose great-grandparents are from Lithuania and Poland). It was something I would have fantasized about, except once a year, it actually happened.

2) The Middle Years: During the early teen years Halloween took a turn for the worse. The wholesome bliss it had once entailed now turned to pure mischief. It became focused around eggs and toilet paper and spray paint and shaving cream and cops and throwing eggs at your ninth grade math teacher's house because she didn't like you because you actually had personality and weren't a silent studious Japanese girl and always gave you less partial credit than the silent Japanese girl next to you because she hated you from day one becuase she was resentful towards you because she had a bad high school experience herself 60 years ago. Halloween was definitely still fun during these years of mischief, but it had lost something. Something great.

3) The Later Years: I don't exactly hate Halloween now. It's a huge party weekend, which is always fun. It's just that for something I once so loved, I hate what it has become-- a party weekend with a horrible, incredibly annoying twist. On Halloween, not only does every girl leap on the opportunity to dress like a whore without criticism and every guy bring out their most annoying side to garner attention from other people's most annoying side. But when I decide that while costumes were fun when I was nine (even then they were a bit of a hassle-- the candy is what reallya blew my bubble), but pretty fucking annoying and unfun now-- when I decide that-- then everyone thinks I'm an unbelievable loser. The guy who goes out on Halloween without a costume is about as loathsome as they come. So either I get into the whole irritating costume thing, or I'm a horrible loser. I tried the costume thing a couple years-- one year I wore my annoying hippy friend's normal clothes and said I was a hippy, one year I attached a piece of string to a tennis racket and wore it around my neck and said I was a tennis racket. Well I'm done. I'm not wearing a costume to the costume party this Halloween. For Christ sake, I don't even have a costume.

I have the sad and sneaking suspicion that Halloween is done evolving. Perhaps a 4th, lame stage will emerge that resembles the current stage but without the perk of girls being naked in public. Either way, for me the Halloween story is a sad one.