I have been doing a lot of inner child healing work as of late. I won't get into all of that here, but, I very recently had a realization I thought was interesting and would like to share.
I have so often struggled with the question How did you come to love Halloween so much? It's something that has just always simply been, for me, and I never really questioned it.
But, with recent things I've been thinking about and focusing on, I realized I may have an actual explanation as to how I initially latched onto Halloween so heavily.
When I was a child, I absolutely loved holidays. All holidays, big or small. I just always wanted to celebrate.
I've realized recently that this was most likely due to the fact that my life was somewhat boring as a child. I was an only child, and a loner through and through. Though I was good at making my own fun, most of the time, everything in my life was pretty repetitive and routine.
But holidays were different. Holidays were the days when things transformed and out-of-the-ordinary things would happen. Visits from relatives, special meals, gift exchanges, decorations...it felt exciting to me, a little girl who was normally just alone in her room playing with her toys or rewatching favorite shows and movies. I lived for the days when things were out of the ordinary.
And what holiday is more out of the ordinary than Halloween? As someone who always seemed to be looking for a little shake-up and excitement, of course Halloween would appeal to me!
First off, I was a child with a strictly enforced, somewhat early bedtime. Being out after dark rarely happened, and it seemed like a special event every time it did. To be able to roam the streets past my normal bedtime, knocking on doors, taking in decorations, absolutely felt like being in an alternate reality. It didn't just feel like a festive celebration, it felt like being in an entirely different realm for a night. It was probably the most different experience a kid like me could possibly have, save for going on a Disney vacation or something like that (which didn't happen for me until I was almost fourteen). Reality truly felt suspended on Halloween night. It was as if there were no rules, and being anything but ordinary was not only allowed, but encouraged.
Halloween gave me the opportunity to figure out who I was beyond my mundane normal. It was the night I could be anything, and made me think about what I loved enough to want to embody and get lost in. It was the night where "forbidden" things, scary and spooky and nightmare-inducing, were suddenly allowed, and celebrated. Those things that I may have carried a secret morbid curiosity about, suddenly weren't off-limits. "Weird" was suddenly a compliment as opposed to an insult. It was a total transformation, and a shock to my young system in the absolute best way.
While I loved all of the other holidays, none of them felt as truly transformational, as truly different, as Halloween. I often say now, as an adult, that Halloween is actually the one holiday where you really can't do the primary things associated with it, any other day of the year if the mood strikes. You can, technically, have family and friends over for a big meal and/or gift exchange on any given day. You can absolutely barbecue any clear day of the year (no matter what Summer Summers of Summerville tries to tell you). However, you can't trick-or-treat when it's not Halloween. You can't carve a pumpkin when they're not in season. You can't usually go to haunted attractions until the season begins (though there are some now that adapt to different holidays). The world at Halloween is just simply a different one, and I think I saw that even more in my childhood. Growing up, it wasn't necessarily uncommon to have a nice dinner with my closest aunt and uncle on any random night, or for my further away relatives to take a trip up during the summer for a random barbecue. My mother sometimes made a full-blown Thanksgiving turkey dinner on a random night during a random month, just so she'd be able to have leftovers for several days after. It wasn't the same as Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter, per se, but it certainly wasn't as absolutely, drastically different as Halloween.
And so now, when I think of the question, What made you come to love Halloween so much?, I think of my inner child, yearning for excitement. It was the transformational quality of Halloween that initially made me love it so much, and that search for something different that led me exactly to who I wanted to be.
Halloween made me realize that different was my home. Strange, unusual, simply spooky. Having that night to stray from who I was, made me who I am.
Stay spooky, my friends.
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