Jack-o-lanterns are popping up on front porches, full aisles at the supermarket are devoted to bite-sized candies and your favorite scary movies have all returned to Netflix for a limited time. All of this can only mean that the best holiday of the year is quickly approaching: Halloween! Halloween is, and always has been, one of my favorite times of the year. In fact, while most people have warm fuzzy memories of hanging stockings on the mantelpiece for Christmas, my warm fuzzy family memories are of putting on zombie makeup and scaring the neighborhood children as part of our tradition of turning our front yard into a haunted house each Halloween. And now that I am a full-grown adult (well, as close to a full-grown adult as I’ll ever be), I got to thinking about just how different Halloween has become for me over the years. From trick-or-treating to costume parades, college parties to handing out candy to today’s trick-or-treaters, things are quite different from how they were when I was a kid just discovering the magic of Halloween. So here is a look back on the ghosts of Halloween’s past!

The first phase of Halloween is the “little kid” stage, which lasts from about preschool through elementary school. This is the magical part of Halloween. All holidays are just so much more magical when you’re a little kid, I suppose because so many of our holiday traditions are aimed at entertaining children. Halloween as a young child is about dressing up like your favorite superheroes and princesses for a whole day, at school no less. It’s about going to costume parades and winning prizes. It’s about going to the farm with your family and picking the perfect pumpkin, only to be grossed out when you have to pull out its innards, and probably let your father do the actual carving because you’re too young to handle the knife yourself. But when that jack-o-lantern is done, you are as proud as if you had just created a work of fine art. Halloween when you’re a little kid is about trick-or-treating up and down your street, trying to fill your little plastic pumpkin basket with as many KitKats and Skittles as it will hold. If you were a little kid in the nineties, like me, it was about watching “Goosebumps” specials, especially the Halloween-centered ones like “The Haunted Mask,” and freaking yourself out. All of October seemed to scream Halloween (pun intended), and it was so much fun.

Once you’re through elementary school, Halloween begins to take on its next form: the “pre-teen” stage. You’re not quite a fully-fledged teenager, but you’re also not a little kid anymore, so while you’re not yet ready for legitimate parties, you’re also kind of over the whole costume parade nonsense of your childhood. Now Halloween is about being with your friends. You plan out elaborate costume themes with your friends: the Pink Ladies, the Plastics, the girls from “Clueless.” You bring your friends to the farm with you to go pumpkin picking, and try to race each other through the corn maze (although you’ll most likely cheat and force your way out through the stalks, whether a path exists there or not). If you live in the areas of the country where mischief night is popular, you’re sneaking out with a bit of toilet paper and shaving cream to wreak havoc on your neighbor’s trees (as if they don’t know it’s you). Suddenly the idea of taking your little brother trick-or-treating doesn’t seem so appealing, and you beg your mom to let you go trick-or-treating alone with your friends. Halloween becomes about school dances, costume parties, and sleepovers full of scary movies. And you know what? It’s still pretty magical.

Phase three is the “teenager” phase, in other words, the high school phase. High school is when you are preparing for Halloween to take its most drastic turn, but you are still holding onto the vestiges of your childhood traditions. You go to the local haunted hayride attraction with your friends, having more fun waiting on line with them than you do running away from the actor dressed as Michael Myers. You’re not spending hours figuring out a costume anymore, preferring to throw something together out of some black clothes you have and a bit of zombie makeup. If you are still trick-or-treating, you’ve replaced the plastic pumpkin basket with a simple pillowcase or garbage bag, and it is your goal to fill that thing to the brim. I mean, this is serious business. Trick-or-treating is strategical. You’ve lived long enough to know where the best neighborhoods to trick-or-treat are, the ones that give out full-sized candy bars, the ones where every house welcomes you to take some free candy rather than darken their windows and pretend they aren’t home when you knock on the door. You go to your friends’ Halloween parties, which if you’re like most normal people and don’t perpetually live in an 80’s movie, usually means you’re not getting wild and crazy, but probably gorging yourself on your Hefty bag full of candy while watching “Paranormal Activity.” Then Halloween is over, and you’re looking forward to Thanksgiving, mostly because you get a long weekend from school. And while Halloween is still enjoyable, it’s not quite so magical anymore.

Then we enter phase four, the “college” stage. Your lazy high school attitude is soon replaced by a rekindled love for Halloween, although at this point it is nothing like the Halloween of your childhood. You’re too old to trick-or-treat, there are no costume contests at school, and there is a strict no-candle policy in your dorm so you’ve resorted to painting pumpkins rather than carving them, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a great Halloween. Now, Halloween has become about the parties. The legit parties, which at best means you’ve figured out how to make orange and black Halloween cocktails, and at worst means you’re doing orange Jell-o shots (although the party hosts ran out of alcohol already and that’s actually just plain old Jell-o in a shot glass). Halloween in college becomes about organizing a trip with your roommates and friends to the nearest farm, so you can recapture that middle school fun of pumpkin picking with your friends. It fills that void of the underlying homesickness that you don’t want to admit you actually feel when you’re at away at college. Halloween in college is about going to your school’s limited run of the “Rocky Horror Picture Show” and freezing your butt off dressed as Columbia outside the theater as they distribute your bag of rice, toast and noisemakers. Oh and costumes? You know that scene in “Mean Girls” when Lindsay Lohan says in girl world, Halloween is about wearing a black dress and some form of animal ears? Yeah, that’s about the most accurate description of college Halloween costumes out there. So while this is a whole new realm of Halloween, it’s almost as magical as when you were a kid.

But then we enter the deadzone of Halloween, the dreaded “twenties.” I mean, what are we supposed to do on Halloween when college is over? Sure, there are still parties to go to, but the older you get, the less you can rely on someone to hold a Halloween party. So you resort to paying attention to local bars and restaurants to see if they will be holding a Halloween event, because guess what? Suddenly, you’re really intent on having awesome Halloween costumes again. Like where was this creativity when you actually had Halloween parties to go to? You try to rally a group of people together to go pumpkin picking, but people have adult lives now and can’t always drop what they’re doing to head to the country so they can ride a hayride (which now costs three dollars more than it did when you were in high school, because life) and pick pumpkins that they could just as easily pick up for less money at the Shop Rite. Halloween becomes about binge-watching every scary movie Netflix has to offer. It becomes about going to Starbucks for a pumpkin spice latte, and dressing your dog up as a witch because, why not? Suddenly, you find yourself buying bags of Skittles and waiting around for the hoards of children dressed as Elsa and Captain America to show up at your doorstep shouting, “Trick-or-treat!” while you have “The Conjuring” playing on your television in the background. And you know what? You’re kind of jealous of those little kids.

I suppose the next phase of life will be the one that brings it full circle. The “parent” phase. Because when you have a little kid of your own, you’ll be back to trick-or-treating, family pumpkin picking, and town costume parades. The cycle will just repeat itself. And I suppose that’s the magic of holidays. Sometimes they’re amazing, sometimes they’re just kind of there, but they are always evolving into something new to enjoy. So no matter what “phase” of Halloween you’re in right now, enjoy it to the fullest, and have the best Halloween ever!