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October 25, 2005
Preserving childishness on holidays: Students should appeciate the Halloween season.
There are skeletons pasted on windows, pumpkins arranged among the orange leaves, flaming paper bags on doorsteps, and trees decorated tenderly with the ever-classy adornment of draped Charmin. Cute kids are pulled in little red wagons or are running about, dressed like ballerinas or cowboys, and energized by the idea of sugar that looms in their future.
Surprisingly willing parents, neighbors, and passerby come together with smiles and contentment.
Another Halloween has brought the opportunity to celebrate a holiday with practical jokes, experiments with identity, morbid graveyard ornaments, and candy.
Some people think holiday activities, like trick-or-treating and Easter egg-hunting, are childish and immature, as though being excited about the sparkly gifts under the Christmas tree lowers one’s integrity and compromises their intellect acknowledged otherwise.
True, a college student hardly has the physical structure or voice to show up at strangers’ doors on Halloween expecting the same candy and response one received when dressed as an angel at the age of five. But age, especially our relatively short amount of years, doesn’t automatically have to translate into festive apathy and holiday denial.
This stage in our lives still positions us to an advantage: We are neither kids nor Santa Clause. We are fortunate enough to be in a transition phase that allows special entertainment opportunities without the responsibility of personally facilitating holiday fun for a child. We need to celebrate before we accumulate too much pride to wear an enormous banana suit on the street.
There are bountiful ways to express holiday excitement, whether with costume parties and contests, trick-or-treating for organizations, participating in neighborhood festivals, and decorating to get you and your community pumped for another round of Halloween antics. Worries about image and appearance shouldn’t inhibit holiday activities, and the people who indulge in (legal) carefree childhood mentalities are allowed the last laugh. And the most candy.
Posted by msveum at October 25, 2005 12:58 AM
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