I hate Halloween and that’s Okay
In fourth grade, I led my class in the Halloween parade around the school. My teacher liked me best, so I got to hold the sign that said “Mrs. Forte’s 4th Grade” and march around proudly in my best alien costume. It was made from a white sheet, with my mother’s best attempt at alien writing in gold paint on one side of the chest. One kid in my class, who was a star on the Pop Warner football team, declared that the writing must say “fat kid” in alien. That was the first time I realised I really, really hated Halloween.
The year after that, I had the single worst teacher in the world. I don’t really want to get into that, but it was an abusive situation that broke me down for years to come. Halloween was a non-event that year. I had no friends due to being alienated in a gifted and talented program populated by children who had all been in the same class since 2nd grade, and my mother chose to keep me in from the usual festivities. Trick-or-Treating brings candy. Candy makes you fat. I was going to be made fat by candy. I was already 148 pounds in 5th grade. Nothing on earth could have made me fat at that point. I had already been fat for 10 years. So that Halloween, and the next few Halloweens, I sat in my living room hiding from the kids I went to school with who were coming to my house to get their candy. Snickers bars, Reeses Cups, Kit-Kats. I wore “the costume,” which was a 4x black nightgown that was given to my mother as an insult when she was thinner. It was an instant costume for all occasions. Elegant, spooky, slinky, and as a kid, it made me feel incredibly beautiful and grown up, even if I had to sit around and hand out candy to everyone else because I was bad and fat and not worthy of candy.
In eighth grade, my friends all had costumes put together and went out as a group. Since I wasn’t allowed to Trick-or-Treat, I wore an apron to school and told everyone I was someone from a relatively obscure manga called “Maison Ikkoku” by Rumiko Takahashi that was…available at our local library in 2001. Almost every girl dressed up as a sexy army girl, ignoring the fact that there are actually female soldiers in the military, because it was after 9/11 and everyone was sure to have the most reactionary costumes ever. One boy was a ‘dead terrorist’ and he got applause from some of the asshole history teachers, but all in all no one liked his costume much, and he was changed out of it by lunch. I’d had no time to make a costume, really, because I had been busy making costumes for my sister. I made her two costumes that year, and sacrificed the skirt of my own intended costume to make billowing sleeves for her medieval princess whatever costume. That night, when I got home, her friends asked when we were going trick or treating, because apparently, I had been invited all along, and apparently, they did want me to go, but my sister hadn’t told me because I was fat and slow and embarrassing and she just didn’t want me there with them. So I had a huge breakdown, because wow, did I feel betrayed, and taken advantage of, and just so incredibly rejected. I sat at home and hid and when the bullies from my bus came to get candy from my house, they took candy, and then one of them farted at me and they ran away screaming “fatty lives here!”
In highschool, I was always the last person to know what our costume group was going to be, and always the person that somehow got hurt. Freshman year we tried to go as people from Fushigi Yuugi, this anime that was popular at the time, and one of my friends ended up biting the shit out of my arm and getting blood and purple lipstick all over my costume, completely ruining it (and my arm) before we’d even begun. Who the fuck bites people, anyway? The next year, my costume was again “the costume” and I wasn’t really going bother with trick or treating. It was another half-baked cosplay that didn’t look remotely right and nobody got it, anyway. I went trick or treating anyway, but my mother confiscated all of my candy and kept it in her room before “donating” it somewhere to someone, which I’m pretty positive never happened.
My junior year of highschool, we all planned to go as gangsters. It was simple enough. Fedoras were all the rage in 2005, and we all had a cheap one from target or some such store lying around, so we threw our shit together and went like that. My english teacher and some of the other young teachers went as gangsters as well, and played along and we were rival gangs. At lunch, all of my friends turned on me and produced badges and said they were undercover cops and made a huge scene out of “arresting” me in the cafeteria. I was once again the butt of the joke, and it wasn’t funny anymore. There was nothing good about Halloween, and there was never going to BE anything good about Halloween, and I quit. I quit trying to put together costumes or find things to do on halloween night or friends to be with because it was just another day out of the year where people were going to treat me like shit, only this time with ugly costumes on. In college, at my most active, I ate candycorn and booberry for a month , shat green, and watched the Rocky Horror Picture Show on DVD with some people that don’t talk to me anymore.
And that’s really okay. You can keep your Nightmare Before Christmas, and your inexplicably sexy costumes, and your pranks and your candy and your parties and your scary movies and rubber masks that still give me panic attacks. Really, it’s fine. It’s great that you like Halloween so much. But please, when I don’t get overly enthusiastic, don’t push me. Don’t go “Awwwww, but it’s Halloweeeeeen! How can you not like Halloweeeeen!?” Because it’s better if you keep it in your way, and this seasonally-challenged scrooge keeps it in hers.
