Jack-o’-lanterns carved from pumpkins and lit with tea lights
By the time college rolls around, Halloween has lost a lot of its spark.
As a kid, Halloween is the best holiday. School days leading up to the big night are peppered with pumpkin-themed crafts and scary stories. And on the night, who can resist dressing up, running around the neighborhood and getting free candy?
When you have long outgrown trick-or-treating, the only significance Halloween might have for you is that it means you get to get an excuse to wear a new costume or two when you go out and see what costumes your friends have come up with. Otherwise, when we hit college, Halloween becomes just another day for many of us.
However, Halloween has always been a special day for me. In the same way that people break out the Christmas music as soon as the stores start carrying candy canes, I have always embraced the Halloween season’s spookiness. Growing up, my mom would make the holiday extra special for my brother and me by taking us to special fall art festivals and frightening nighttime hayrides. Now as the weather begins to get colder and the leaves change colors, I busy myself with creepy books and movies, indulging in all things creepy and macabre in what little free time I can.
But for the past few years, I have felt alone in my addiction to Halloween. While I have been eager to carve a freaky jack-o’-lantern or bark at the moon on Oct. 31, I have encountered numerous people who’d rather not acknowledge the day at all, much less indulge in a few scares with some horror films. My freshman year I was disappointed to get all dressed up in my costume on the weekend before Halloween only to find out none of my friends had any desire to join. I became like Linus in the old Peanuts Halloween special, sitting alone and dismayed at the pumpkin patch, wondering what had happened to the true spirit of Halloween.
However, this year, I noticed something unique on Tumblr. While browsing through the site late September, I saw an influx of eager posts counting down the days to October. When Oct. 1 rolled around, the site exploded into a mass of orange and black. Eager posts ushering in the new month popped up constantly, featuring pumpkins, skulls, bats and ghosts. There were GIFs of dancing skeletons and pumpkin people everywhere. People changed their blog names to commemorate the holiday. I have seen the “Halloween Masterpost” pop up on the site numerous times, providing a list of links to the best spooky recipes, crafts and costume ideas.
For the first time in years, I didn’t feel alone in my excitement for Halloween.
A lot can be said about Tumblr as a website. Its “like” and “reblog” functions are useful for sharing art and news and building communities based on mutual interest, but I have found the site also has its negative sides, a tendency to pass along misinformation and malicious lies chief among them. However, in its own silly way, Tumblr has captured the spirit of Halloween as I remember it from when I was a kid.
Though I have been fighting against midterms stress the past few weeks, I appreciate that I only have to log on to Tumblr and scroll for a few seconds before I am greeted by an image of an adorable ghost, a skeleton pun comic, creepy-cute music or some GIFs of the prettiest scenes from The Nightmare Before Christmas.
For me, indulging in some Halloween-themed nostalgia can provide a break from the rigors of schoolwork. As fun as Halloween was as a kid, I think I appreciate little signs of the season even more now. Halloween lets me escape from the normal for a few weeks every fall, even if that escape sometimes is little more than a three-second GIF of dancing skeletons.
