The scariest sham of the year

No amount of candy or costumes can convince this author to like Halloween. (Adele van Wyk photo)

Halloween is an abomination of a holiday, if you even want to label it as that. The section of society that can really enjoy the day is practically less than one per cent. Grades 5 and 6 were the years Halloween was awesome. Before and after that it is either terrifying or awkward.

Imagine yourself as a five-year-old. It is your first Halloween with classmates and everyone is dressed as a Power Ranger or a princess or something equally adorable. You do your fun crafts, dance to the Monster Mash and eat some candy. It’s a good day. Then you see the older kids out trick-or-treating that night. They’re all terrifying axe murderers or demented clowns and you are scarred for life. I guarantee every person who ever celebrated Halloween as a child has one memory of pure terror.

Now let’s fast forward to junior high. You are an awkward preteen, determined to be mature, but you still love Halloween. Too bad! First you have to convince your friends that you are not doing anything but homework on Halloween night, then sneak around trick-or-treating because you don’t want to be called a baby by all the cool kids. Half the time people refuse to give you any candy because “You’re too big to be trick or treating.” No matter what you want to believe, nobody thinks your Power Ranger costume is cool anymore.

Then in high school and university, Halloween becomes just another occasion for you to drink excessively and engage in petty vandalism. Also, Mean Girls got it right when they said, “In the regular world, Halloween is when children dress up in costumes and beg for candy. In Girl World, Halloween is the one night a year when a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.”

I’m already dreading buying candy and giving it to little kids dressed as Dora or Hannah Montana or whatever kids find cool nowadays (makes me appreciate living in an apartment building). Grown human beings just think that Halloween is the perfect time to scare their neighbour by charging at them with a chainsaw, screaming. I’m not looking forward to that, either.

I look back on my lifetime of Halloween and I have to wonder…did I help my father’s back problem by making him lug around my four full pillowcases of candy? Did I really eat that many terrible molasses kisses because they were free? Did I really get into arguments with the elderly because they didn’t give me enough candy?

Yep, I did all of that. Why?

Because Halloween sucks!