By Dara Adeeyo
Tomorrow is Halloween and I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m pretty excited. On my list of favorite holidays, Halloween is a couple spots behind my birthday (that’s right, I consider it a holiday) and Christmas. I look forward to all three of these holidays every year, and I often wonder where my fascination for dressing up as a different person for one day or night came from. I think it began when I was in kindergarten.
When I was in kindergarten, I attended an American International School (A.I.S.) in Nigeria. Other than at my school, no one in Africa celebrated Halloween. And prior to my year at A.I.S., I attended a Nigerian school that didn’t celebrate Halloween, so the whole concept of Halloween was new to me. The week of Halloween, my teacher announced that there would be a Halloween extravaganza in my school’s courtyard and that all students should wear costumes. Not knowing what Halloween was, I asked my friend Tara, and she said, “We get to dress up. I’m being a princess!” When I got home that school day, I told my mom that I needed a costume and that we had to go buy one immediately. Since Halloween was just days away, I decided that I would just stick with whatever costume my mom found. And lucky for me (not really), I ended up being a clown. I was excited I had a costume, but deep down, I was sad I couldn’t be something as pretty like a princess. So on Halloween, my dad painted my face. I had red lipstick around my mouth and thought I looked cool. I was instantly hooked to the whole dressing up thing. When I found out that people would be giving us free candy, I was even more excited.
Halloween, like other holidays, has its different stages in your life. The first stage is when you’re young. As a kid, Halloween is all about having the best costume and getting free candy. Everyone remembers what it was like in elementary school. You would dress up and have a parade and class party. Once you got out of school and finished your homework, you were able to go trick-or-treating before sundown with a family member and begged to trick-or-treat for just one extra hour. Yeah, those were the good old days.
The second stage comes in middle school. Halloween hits that awkward stage in your life-hello puberty! At this point you aren’t exactly sure of what to do for Halloween. Cool and cute costumes are still “in,” but no one really knows if trick-or-treating is still “cool.” I know with my friends, trick-or-treating got old fast. My friends and I either hung out in our costumes at someone’s house (AKA a parent-supervised Halloween party), or went trick-or-treating for no more than an hour. We were over the whole going door-to-door thing. After a certain point, you just don’t see the excitement in asking for candy from strangers. I mean, weren’t we told as kids to NOT take candy from strangers?
Finally, the last stage happens in high school. In high school I noticed a drastic change in Halloween. Girls were no longer princesses or kittens. They were now “Sexy Cinderellas” or “Sexy Kittens.” These type of costumes apparently seem to not stop after high school. Like Lindsay Lohan’s character in the movie “Mean Girls” said: “In ‘girl world,’ it’s the one night a year a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it. The hardcore girls just wore lingerie and some form of animal ears.” I don’t really understand this part of Halloween. What makes a girl think that she can throw on a sports bra and booty shorts and call herself a referee? How about some originality?
Nevertheless, the final stage of Halloween doesn’t simply consist of whore-for-a-day look-alike girls. Some people actually put effort into their costumes and revert back to their younger years when Halloween was all about dressing up and looking cool and cute.
On that note, Happy Halloween!
Dara Adeeyo is a sophomore print journalism student. You may e-mail her at [email protected].