Halloween

I decorate for two holidays; Christmas and Halloween. I decorate for Christmas because I need joy in my life during the dark winter months and I have a very personal connection with the religious aspect of the celebration for that particular holiday. But days are still reasonably long and warm during October, and there's absolutely no religious significance to the day for me personally, so why is Halloween the only other holiday I put any effort into decorating for?

It's been this way since I was a child. Even stranger perhaps is where Halloween falls when I consider my favorite holidays, again just behind Christmas and tied with Easter, both of which have a powerful personal implication for me. So it might be interesting to unpack just why it is that Halloween means so much to me.

My first, most obvious response is, of course, candy. Look, much to the chagrin of my dentist (or maybe not, considering the repeat business), I love candy. Christmas candy is good, and Easter candy holds a particularly special place for me considering jellybeans are like a legitimate personal vice, but make no mistake that the seasonal excuse to load up on sugar and chocolate is a compelling drive in my life. Of particular interest are the honey-based sweets, like candy corn and mellocreme pumpkins, which have a strong seasonal lean associated with them because I pretty much only associate that flavor with autumn.

And of course, my own personal love of the season the holiday occurs in definitely plays a roll. I grew up and continue to live in an area with distinct seasonal changes, which is nice, but Fall and Spring are my favorites for easy to enumerate reasons. Spring is a lovely time of rebirth and fresh growth, and Fall is when all that growth withers and dies.

I appreciate the contrast, I guess is the point there.

I'm also a big fan of cool weather, but not cold, and warm weather, but not hot. Temperature changes drive my desire to spend any time at all outside, and both of the seasonal shifts associated with Fall and Spring encourage me to spend more time outdoors than is usual for me. Which helps with stuff like vitamin D and dopamine production. Halloween falling during one of those seasons certainly plays a roll in my appreciation.

So the holiday falling during a nice season and the celebration including copious amounts of sweets are factors, sure. But Valentines day lands close to the beginning of Spring and encourages unholy amounts of chocolate consumption, yet I kinda hate Valentines day, so those can't be the only, or even the main driving factors of why I like Halloween so much. There's more to unpack here.

The other main aspect of the celebration of Halloween is, of course, the costumes. Now I'm not a fashion focused person. By any stretch of the imagination. I wear clothes that are clean and comfortable, and that drives pretty much my entire fashion sense. But I am a social creature, despite my introversion, so I've always been aware that despite my not caring much about my clothes other people did, in fact, pay attention to that. But as a kid around Halloween, that sorta vanished. I was aware that social norms for dress suddenly didn't matter as much, at least where I grew up, and it was much easier to feel accepted.

And in my experience the costumes didn't even need to be extravagant. Wear a red shirt with black stripes and say you're dressed as Calvin, everyone's on board with that. Elaborate costumes based on movie characters were a thing, of course, but throwing a white sheet over your head to be a retro ghost was just as good. People were judging basically only your appearance, which seems pretty shallow on the face of it, but they weren't judging quality, they were simply thrilled you seemed to be participating. And that was sorta a novel thing for me, given the social pressures present at literally every other time of year.

So this year I'm probably just dressed up as Steve Jobs again, a task as simple as putting on a black turtleneck and carrying around an iPhone. But I'm also definitely appreciating the chance to feel like, for a moment, there's no social pressure to look or dress a certain way. Express what you want to express with your clothes however you want to, and you're not gonna get weird looks. Or at least, no weirder than the looks everyone else is getting.

And also the weather is nice and cool and everyone is giving away candy. All taken together it seems pretty obvious why Halloween is one of my favorite holidays.