Seen through the eyes of someone who has never really celebrated Halloween is obviously way different from those that celebrate it religiously every year.
I, being part of the group that has never really celebrated Halloween, see it through a different lens, which is it being almost surreal and movie-like.
Recently, however, I have gotten more involved in the Halloween season; for the past couple years I have dressed up and I have even gone trick-or-treating.
For the last three years, since I started college, I decided I was old enough to start trick-or-treating and dressing up for Halloween. As a child, my parents never really let me go out trick-or-treating because of the dangers announced in the media and our religious background. However, once I reached a certain age I was more confident and willing to put myself out there and be a little bit more rebellious to a certain extent.
So far, this experience of dressing up for Halloween and going trick-or-treating has been pretty interesting. I've seen quite a few things; some that are very nice and some that really scared me and had me regretting my decision of leaving my house on that day. One thing is for sure, those experiences are nothing compared to what this Halloween has in store.
This Halloween with the current phenomenon of the creepy clowns has been a little, well...creepy. To think about Halloween, what I thought was just a harmless event, which over the past few years has taught me that it can be, all of a sudden has turned into a purge-like event where you have these creepy creatures and individuals thinking that it's funny to go out and scare people in their own homes and in their communities.
This is not something that I thought really happened. I don't know if it has been luck or if it was just that normal people don't do that sort of thing, but for the three years that I've been trick-or-treating and dressing up for Halloween, it was more about the good parts of Halloween. The family part where it really is a community event that allows the kids to be silly and the parents as well to uncover their childlike wonder and dress up alongside their kids.
This year, however, it is very much like the movies. With these creepy clowns and these purge-like characters roaming around even far before Halloween, and I feel as though it's damaging the children and the community.
This year all that the media has portrayed as Halloween is finally coming true and it is sad, because what that means is that society has managed to take one more thing that people use as a family event and corrupt it to be a bad thing.
Halloween already has a tainted history, we do not need more people working to feed the imagination of others.
Instead, we need to convince them that Halloween is more that what capitalism has converted it into.
A day for fun costumes and a lot of candy.
