Yay! After googling a little, I've discovered I'm not the only one out there who isn't a big fan of Halloween. I've read a few posts from people discussing the reasons they don't like the holiday, and some are similar. I thought since it's coming up I'll join in the ranks and discuss why I don't get into the holiday so much.
This has nothing to do with bad childhood memories. In fact, I have some fun memories of Halloween. I remember going around the neighborhood with my siblings, and particularly remember the year I talked my mom into dressing up my disabled brother and taking him with us (so I didn't have to go alone). It was traditional to have a Halloween parade at school, when we paraded our costumes through all of the classrooms. There was my favorite costume of a black cat, and memories of my grandparents visiting to avoid the kids at their house. My grandpa loved pulling little pranks on the kids, but not bad ones. The one year we built a little cardboard booth or haunted house out in the yard for the kids to go to, and my sister sat behind there for a few hours cackling while the neighbors strung up a ghost to float across the street to their house. Another when I was at home with a sister and completely humiliated her by opening the door and doing a blood curdling scream while kids were coming down the street. Great memories. So with all of these memories that make me smile, why do I dislike the holiday so much?
- Wearing a costume: I may have to explain this a little. I can actually have a lot of fun dressing up, but the issue here isn't dressing up as much as it is what and where the dressing up will happen. Dressing up for a performance or a party is no problem. It's going out into public that I don't like. Not sure exactly why I have a problem with it, but it may be the simple fact that I don't like bringing out attention to myself, and a costume will do that.
- Dark Decorations: So I have to put a slight disclaimer here. I'm not objecting to all decorations. I actually think some of the little pumpkins, graveyard stones, little witch-crafts (you see what I did there...ha!), and full moons are completely cute. It's the really dark stuff that I don't like. For example, I had a neighbor in a previous neighborhood who really liked gory decorating. His front yard, which was small to begin with, was jam packed with hideous skeletons and zombie-like figures with bloody dismembered bodies, and even one year put a car on it with a cracked windshield with a dismembered figurehead poking through it. That's too much for me. Keep with the cutesy stuff please.
- Focus on Horror such as Haunted Houses/Movies: I don't like intentionally being scared or scaring others. It actually takes a lot to really sincerely frighten me. It goes a little more along the last reason. I don't like dark disgusting things. I've seen horror movies before and I find them more loathsome than frightening. As for the haunted houses, I've never really gone to one live, but whenever I watch the ones where the television people send a naïve or sensitive reporter in there, I can't understand what exactly is so scary about them. They actually look more stupid than scary.
- Pranks: This in particular I had no actual awareness that it was a tradition until I went to college and someone pulled a prank on our apartment, but then thinking about it, I realized there was a sort of pranking that happened in my town that we didn't like. If anyone left carved pumpkins out on the porch overnight, it was well known that some neighborhood hoodlums would be coming around and smashing them. I don't like pranks in general. I find many of them are quite rude and disrespectful of people, so it's not necessarily restricted to this holiday.
- Overall Morbid Focus: Continuing with my theme about how I don't like dark things. The focus on death and dead things particularly when they get really hideous is not my thing.
