Grown-up Halloween

I hate Halloween. Well, I should say I used to hate Halloween. 

As a kid, I loved to dress up, bob for apples, trick-or-treat, and all the things that kids like to do on Halloween. I think the majority of my growing up years I dressed as some incarnation of a princess or fairy (what can I say? It suited me). I marched in Halloween parades, made Halloween crafts--anything you can think of to celebrate the holiday. 

In high school, the appeal of Halloween started to fade. I may have dressed up to go to a party, or even to school if I was feeling brave. Halloween was still fun, but it wasn't the same. 

College is when I started to hate Halloween. I suppose it started my sophomore year. I attended a few pre-Halloween parties and had a lot of fun. These parties all had themes--my favorite being the super hero party--so costumes turned out to be some variation on a similar theme. The actual night of Halloween that year is when I became utterly disenchanted with the holiday. My roommates and I came fully clothed in charming costumes, which is more than I can say for the majority of party-goers that night. There were cowgirls (aka girls dressed in the shortest denim mini skirts they could find), there were playboy bunnies, there were bikini models, "nurses" (the scantily clad kind that you only see on Halloween), school girls a la Britney Spears, etc.

Now, on any other campus I would have been less offended; I wouldn't have participated in that particular brand of festivities, but I wouldn't have been offended either. BYU is different. For those of you who don't know, there is a very strict honor code at BYU that applies to your whole life, not just your behavior on campus. There are particularly specific guidelines about dress and grooming, and I'm pretty sure (ahem, positive) that playboy bunnies and mini-skirt clad cowgirls would not have passed the test. It was discouraging, to say the least, to see a girl from your Book of Mormon class wearing next to nothing at a Halloween party. 

Once I realized what a horrible opportunity for hypocrisy in Provo this holiday turned out to be, I didn't care to participate in the "fun"; in fact, I was disgusted with the whole thing. 

Meeting and dating Jonathan didn't help, either. He never dressed up as a naughty school girl or anything; he is just what I call "the Scrooge of Halloween." This is what he dressed as this year... 

And the year before that...

And the year before that...

So you can see that his lack of participation and my general disdain for the holiday have added up to three years of pretty lame Halloweens. 

Well, this year was different; it was my first grown-up Halloween. I didn't have to go to college parties, or dress up to go to school (I did, however, have to participate in an office-wide costume parade--but that's a different story). This year, I made soup for our ward party, I carved my own jack-o-lantern for the first time (my dad always used to do it), I made cupcakes for my nieces, and kids came to trunk-or-treat at my car!

I imagine that having your own kids makes Halloween even better, but this year, for the first time, I didn't have to be a Halloween participant, I was able to be a Halloween organizer--even without kids. It's a whole different world! Nobody at Caren's Halloween party was dressed as a playboy bunny or a skanky school girl--which was a wonderful breath of fresh air (there were some other issues of decorum, but I don't need to get into that). And even though I don't have kids yet, I do have some darling nieces. 

All of that made for a pretty great Halloween--and I no longer have to hate it.