Trick Or Treat No More

For my entire childhood, Halloween was a hallmark of my year for one reason: candy. The other components (costumes, pumpkins, ghosts, and ghouls) took a back seat to my narrowly focused obsession on acquiring M&M's, Crunch Bars, and a plethora of other sweet treats. For days after the big night, I remember my mother putting a selection of my stash in my lunch box every day. Eventually, it ran out and I forgot about the holiday until the following year. However, Halloween has changed for good in college. After four years of high school and not dressing up anymore, Halloween has seen a shockingly revamped resurgence with my arrival at college.

Saturday night was the official night of celebration on college campuses across the country. However, instead of innocently wandering from house to house asking "trick or treat?", the vast majority of college students were not-so-innocently wandering from frat house to frat house asking for "more beer, please?" In retrospect, it seems that the scantily-clad, drunken Halloween traditions at colleges across the country are the natural progression of events in the process of aging. It is a more mature version of Halloween, where there is no chance of being chased away from a house simply because you are too old. Simply put, it's college kids making their own fun on All Hallows Eve.

Halloween presents an interesting opportunity to examine the process of growing up. Most holidays, like Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter, never change their core composition no matter how old you get. However, for Halloween, we evolve from toddlers being helped every step of the way by our parents to independent preteens who start venturing out on their own, to apathetic teenagers who stay inside or terrorize the younger trick-or-treaters to typical college students (see above) and eventually to parents who start the whole process over. This list, which was meant to be a a timeline of Halloween, sounds a lot like life, doesn't it?