Goodbye, Halloween

Running through the closed-off streets up to every house on the block, holding your best friend’s hands. Ringing the doorbell, showing off your costume, screaming “Trick or treat!” Pouring out your candy on the living room floor, trading your favorites with siblings for theirs, filling your stomach until it aches.

This is Halloween. At least, that was Halloween, before some unspoken year passed and every little girl in a princess costume and little boy in his Superman blues stopped running through the streets and started Ubering to parties.

“I miss it,” senior Marisa DeFranza said. “Parties and everything are fun, but every Halloween I miss being little again.”

These feelings of melancholy are typical for anyone when remembering a forgotten experience, something they outgrew. It’s sad to think that at a certain time, you stop some traditions because you’ve gotten too old for them. Makes you sympathize with Peter Pan just a little bit, right?

Teenagers don’t get together in groups to walk through the streets with pillowcases and masks; we gather at a house in our costumes and stay planted on the couch for the night. As we mature, so do our costumes and we lose the childish touch for something more adult.

“It was so much easier to get a costume back then,” junior Sophia Hug said. “You could go to any Spirit and ask for a number and that was it. Now we have to order a million things on Amazon to find one semi-decent costume.”

Costumes have changed with Halloween’s traditions, becoming more elaborate and much more important. Teens want to look the part, while still looking good.

As much as teenagers can take the blame for this, it’s a part of our culture. At some point, adults expect you to, well, grow up. If we walked around town and asked a stranger for candy, an angry or at least confused reaction is to be expected.

It’s a bittersweet feeling that comes not just with outgrowing Halloween, but with growing up in general. On every holiday, young adults are reminded that we aren’t quite kids anymore.  At some point for Christmas, your parents ask you to help wrap presents, they don’t write “From Santa.” Everyone knows Rudolph and the rest of the reindeer aren’t really eating those carrots. The Tooth Fairy is your mom and the Easter Bunny is your dad. This are realizations that come with adulthood.

There is a reason we can’t say young forever and, if nothing else, that reason is to pass on these traditions to younger siblings and even our own future children. At some point, it becomes your turn to leave $5 under someones pillow, crumble carrots in the snow outside and plant eggs around the house.

We grow up so someone else can stay young.

So even if we have to wave goodbye to Halloween and other memories of holidays past, at least the holidays will always be full of myths and legends—for someone else.