Halloween: The Worst Holiday of the Year

Halloween was last week and while that probably made candy hungry children happy, the fact is that Halloween is actually the lamest holiday of the year.

 

The biggest reason that Halloween ranks near the bottom of my holiday list (in a distant last place after April fool’s day) is because of the dressing up. Now, many of my Facebook friends have recently posted status updates criticizing people’s tendency to use Halloween to look like sluts. Specifically, these friends have pointed out how many women use the holiday to look like sexy nurses, sexy witches, sexy maids, or other variations of sexiness. To this I would also add guys who choose virtually nothing on Halloween (albeit not always in a “sexy” way).

I concede that sexy/scanty costumes can unfortunately objectify the wearer, but I would also say that I’m not terribly bothered by them. If you want to look like a slut and objectify yourself, that’s your choice. What I do think is silly is the need for a holiday to do so. Why not just dress like that all the time? Or why not do so in conjunction with other holidays wear dressing up isn’t an end in itself. (What better to celebrate the fourth of July than with sexy nurses and guys in loincloths?)

 

Slightly more seriously, the persistence of dressing up seems to suggest that many people have latent or repressed desires that they express on Halloween. The prominence of sexual costumes indicates that many of those repressed desires are sexual, though other Halloween staples like zombies or robots equally represent social insecurities simmering beneath the surface of people’s psyche. It’s possible to look at Halloween in this context through the lens of Stephen Greenblatt’s theory of subversion and containment; people subvert social norms through their Halloween behavior, but such momentary subversion allows them to continue participating in those norms the rest of the time (a rough, inadequate summary of the theory, I admit). Still, it seems like it might be better to try to reconcile desire with belief. For example, instead of condemning sex or allowing technology to pervade our lives (while simultaneously expression trepidation about those issues through costume), we could figure out a lifestyle that would balance our values with our desires.

 

There are other reasons that Halloween doesn’t make sense as well. Take for instance, its complete detachment from its harvest origins. Since few people participate in harvests, or have any connection to agriculture, it makes little sense to celebrate a harvest holiday. In light of the kinds of costumes that people tend to wear, we could at least move it to a warmer month. (August is hot and doesn’t have an abundance of holidays.) In reality, however, the point is that the meaninglessness of Halloween actually detracts from the pleasure it brings. In Guy Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle he includes a chapter called “Spectacular Time” in which he introduces a concept called pseudo-cyclical time. Basically he makes the point that society has moved to an industrialize, arbitrary, and falsely seasonal concept of time. Though he doesn’t get into Halloween, the celebration of such a holiday clearly contributes to the thesis that society may merely be a parody, and consequently less fulfilling, than it once was.

 

The reasons that Halloween is both outdated and inadequate could go on and on.  Hopefully, however, the notion of “holidays” like Halloween—where we get to take a break from our labor, standard behavior, and the values predicated on these things—will eventually become unnecessary.