There comes a point in every young adult’s life when the meaning of Halloween quietly slips away from us. The holiday, once defined by candy comas, pumpkin patches, harvest festivals, and the sacred release of the Starbucks fall menu, suddenly becomes secondary. Now, it’s all about the costume, or rather, costumes, plural, for the multiple nights out of the week. Occasionally, we still take pride in rituals of fall baking, romanticising the change in color on the leaves in St. Stephen’s Green, and rewatching Hocus Pocus; however, our priorities are not nearly the same. 

Your main concern no longer lies in which neighborhood gives out king-size bars; it’s which pres you’re going to for the duration of ‘Halloweekend”, who’s got the club tickets, and how many WhatsApp or Instagram group chats you’ll need to beg in before someone finally says, “Yeah, I have a spare Wig Wam tix.” It’s a delicate balance: looking the best you’ve ever looked while still pretending you didn’t try too hard. You want the photo, the one that proves you had a good Halloween, especially to your friends from home, yet still maintain the illusion that your entire look was just something you “threw together” from your closet. Hot, but not too slutty. Sexy enough to get slightly alarming stares from the moms on the Luas, but still respectable enough to earn a convincing “you look unreal” from the UCD girls in the Grand Social bathroom at 12 am while your friend is throwing up and you have managed to already lose one of the wings from your costume and the group you arrived with. You’re feeling too sober to bear the Amazon corset that has conveniently cycled through your whole friend group. You convinced your flatmate to pull “just a bit tighter.” You naively thought that delivering that snatched look would be easy. Yet, here you are now, not even one Buzz Ball in. Your reckless decisions are catching up to your light-headed self, as you struggle to move your torso. It’s already night one, and you’re wondering how you’re even going to rally for the rest of the weekend. Achieving the ideal Pinterest-worthy look, without having to explain to someone your costume. So the eternal conundrum looms over you: Are you going for a vision of elegance or a clownish parody? Chic or seductive?  Perhaps the answer lies in a whimsical surrender of all dignity and self-worth.  Routinely, our costumes have devolved into whatever we can scavenge from the €5 section in Penneys: sexy nurse, sexy cowgirl, sexy princess, ethereal mermaid, sexy Albert Einstein, or settling for the old reliable black cat. It is the one night of the year when feminists of all kinds (performative or not) can ignore the boundaries and rules they have subscribed to and look like a slut in an entirely justifiable and rational manner.   

My middle-school self would laugh to see me now. Back then, my greatest concern was being stuck as the brown M&M in the group costume, or even worse, Theodore from Alvin and the Chipmunks. I would spend months planning my costume, ensuring it was unique and not overdone, waiting for the sacred day when I could finally reveal my witch, snow princess, or cupcake at the school costume competition. But now, all we hope is that the €10 fairy outfit from Shein won’t give us a skin rash.

Back then, Halloween had a calculated strategy. Mapping out the best houses for trick-or-treating and calculating how long it would take to circle back for seconds without getting caught. Where you may be going to traverse uncharted territory, who knows?  Trick-or-treating was an art form, and the ones with older siblings knew it best. Honestly, it was an early crash course in economics and social etiquette. You learned how polite to be at the door (“say thank you, even if it’s a lollipop”) and when to barter like your life depended on it (“I’ll trade you two KitKats for one Reese’s”). Halloween night was when everyone’s true colours were revealed, a testament that still holds true today, just in an entirely different way. Suddenly, twelve-year-olds turned into candy smugglers, cutting deals like cutthroat cartel members. Chocolate was gold; sour patch kids and gummies were viewed as currency. But anyone who thought a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup was worth an Almond Joy? Well, absolute amateur.

Our college selves haven’t outgrown Halloween; we’ve only rebranded it, trading pillowcases for shooters and the sugar rush for a hangover that lasts until Friday’s lecture, hoping nobody remembers how you acted the night before. But part of me feels nostalgic for when Halloween meant something much simpler, when my mom had to “inspect” every piece of candy, and my older sibling inhaled the spoils of my pillowcase like a feral raccoon. While we may still dress up for Halloween, it can never be what it once was; it is a night of performing and pretending in every way imaginable. From complimenting someone’s costume you hate or have no clue what it is, pretending you remember that one girl from your history lecture, or really leaning into your couple’s Halloween costume with your boyfriend, all just to convince everyone that your relationship is stable. Like every moment in college, “Halloweekend” feels like it is the most important thing and nothing at all, the buildup, the momentum, all for it to crash and burn or become another great story time. It has the potential to be one of the best nights of the semester or easily the most unbearable. At some point, the measure of Halloween stopped being how much candy we could carry and became how late we could stay out. Somewhere in between it all, we said goodbye to the golden age of Halloween without realising it had ended, and we would never truly get it back.