As Halloween gets closer, I’m excited to write about what is my absolute favorite holiday.
I’ve written about Halloween on this blog before briefly, but I’ve never broken down the holiday itself and why I love it.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always loved Halloween for two reasons:
- Unashamedly eating a bunch of free candy
- Getting to spend a day pretending to be somebody else
Before getting any deeper, I want to send you down the path of my Halloween history. I always wanted to be as accurate as I could be with my costumes and how I “played” them. Starting with my Tin-Man costume all the way to last year’s Thelonious from Shrek:
There were other Halloweens with other characters, but for each one, I always made sure to go all-out.
My parents always loved Halloween as well. They would dress up themselves and decorate our house with our school artwork and put pumpkins, skeletons, and spider-webs wherever they could. My dad still does this and it’s the best!
The spirit of Halloween was always alive in our house. So when I’ve recently started to see posts of people nostalgic for ’90s Halloweens, I had to stop and wonder myself, “was it really better back then?“
Judging from my photos, you can tell that I never gave up the spirit of Halloween. I still rank it as my favorite holiday because I can still dress up, but a lot of the candy has since turned into beer.
There’s nothing quite like sending beers to the Realm of Darkness dressed as a member of Organization XIII:
But from what I can tell, candy to beer has always been the natural progression:
I know we live in the age of the internet, so people are always going to be reminiscing on the way things were. But I feel like Halloween truly has the best progression of any holiday.
Fun costumes and candy to fun costumes and beer is a great transition.
But what was it about the Halloween of old that people really miss? Let’s take a walk down memory lane…
The Goosebumps theme song might be the greatest song of all-time, but let’s address the elephant in the room: yes, there seemed to be a special aura of Halloween around 25 years ago.
From the ’90s until the early ’00s, every single one of your favorite shows had Halloween specials.
Not to mention all the Goosebumps episodes themselves, but there was something about Halloween being heavily featured across all television programming for kids that made the time of the year that much more special.
From the Halloweentown movies to the Scary Godmother movies, the Halloween vibes were always felt.
But all of it never felt corporate. It just felt like part of it.
Today, I feel like it’s rare to see spiders crawling across the corner of your TV during October. Nickelodeon used to do that all the time.
Here’s my first point of realization that Halloween hasn’t changed: maybe we just grew up a bit and don’t watch Nickelodeon anymore?
I couldn’t even tell you what shows are on Nick anymore. I just know that the ones I grew up with aren’t there. The SpongeBob of today is not the one I grew up with. But, that doesn’t mean kids aren’t getting the same experience, right?
Who knows? But I just know that Halloween specials still exist for kids, that’s for sure.
The next thing is the school classroom nostalgia.
We’re not in school anymore 20-somethings and 30-somethings. We don’t get to go into Halloween-decorated rooms anymore because we’re not in 1st grade anymore.
I know several teachers that still decorate their rooms for Halloween and I’m sure they do it because they have fond memories from yesteryear.
I guarantee classrooms like the one above still exist.
I’m also sure that junior high students still get Halloween parties like I did and I’m sure kids in younger classes still get to dress up in their costumes to school.
Whether they do or don’t, that’s sort of up to us as the next generation of parents, right?
Beyond TV specials and classrooms, the one thing I do miss the most about Halloween as a kid was that the weather actually felt like it was supposed to. Brisk, leaves on the ground, but manageably nice weather.
Nowadays, it stays a million degrees until it starts to snow. There’s no in-between. Fall weather is slowly becoming something to be nostalgic for because I feel like we don’t get much of it anymore.
Author’s Note: However, as I write this, we’re in the midst of a week-straight of 50-degree weather and I absolutely love it. The Sad Boy Season playlist is on and jamming:
After further investigation, I think people are just bummed they aren’t kids anymore. I don’t think Halloween’s gotten any worse.
Look at my parents from the beginning of this story; do you think I’d love Halloween as much as I do if they didn’t make it special for me? Probably not!
So it’s my mission to have as much fun as I can every Halloween because I’ve had fun on every Halloween I’ve ever had. I will continue to do so and when I have kids of my own one day, I’ll make it my mission to ensure they love Halloween as well.
So, yes, feel nostalgic for a Halloween that used to look like this:
But understand that while it may look or feel a little different today than it did then, just remember that Halloween is always what you make it to be.
Dress up to be whoever you want to be. Let down that hard shell you’ve developed since the ’90s or ’00s and remember what it was like to have fun. You can’t repeat it, but once you start to pretend having fun again, you might just have a little by accident.
I leave you with this song to head into your Halloween with the best spooky vibes I possibly can:
Happy Halloween!!!
~DS
P.S.
One thing we do have over kids today was our candy. Kids these days don’t have Reptar Bars or Wonder Balls and it shows…
The Danny Diaries 