Grace Cavanaugh, Staff Writer~
Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. Maybe it’s because I like being scared, or maybe it’s because I like dressing up, but something about this spooky time of year has always gotten me excited.
My sophomore year in high school, my friend D invited a group of friends to her house for a Halloween party. What this entailed was watching a scary movie, eating food, roasting marshmallows over a fire, and then going to hang out on the playground of the church behind her house. I designated myself the historian of the group because I had the most amount of storage on my iPod.
I still have the videos from that first ‘Halloween Party’. We hung out at the playground, chatting and swinging and such, until someone thought they saw something in the field, so we started walking around. The videos turned into something very similar to the Blair Witch Project as we talked about who would die first and such. A friend of mine ran off into the woods and we were all screaming and laughing. He came back, but only after we all hedged bets that he would be the first of us to get murdered by a masked killer wielding a knife.
The next year, I borrowed my sister’s camera. It did not have a light, so I used one of the many flashlights we brought from the house to kind-of light the face of whoever I was talking to. That was an interesting party because they figured out a way to climb onto the roof of the church, and then one of the guys pulled a book out of his backpack that we were reading for our English class. Needless to say, D yelled at him for bringing homework to a party and we left him on the roof to go play soccer in the field.
Our final year, senior year of high school, was probably the most terrifying. Unbeknownst to us, someone had been breaking into local churches and stealing lawn-care equipment. So, after our scary movie, The Uninvited, which was actually very good, we went out to the fire and laughed when one of our friends ended up in a chair that sunk into the ground and then threw him into the dirt when a leg broke. Afterwards, we took our normal pilgrimage to the playground.
A few of the group climbed onto the top of the church, and then got down to join me and a few of the others on the swings. I somehow obtained a large stick that I carried around “for safety purposes” and we’d split into two small groups again: one group was messing with a soccer ball on the field while the other, my group, was playing on the playground. All of a sudden, a cop car pulls up and we all freak out. Turns out he was just patrolling, but it still scared us and most of us went home after the officer left.
My freshman year of college, I was not able to go home and D didn’t throw a party because we’d spread across the continent. I was a little sad this year was going to be different from the past three, but it did not mean I could not have fun. Instead, I dressed up as a druid and wore a long dress and bodice to my chemistry lab. After, I met some friends in Hopwood Auditorium and we acted out Oedipus Rex for their quiz on it later that week. When the play was read, we went back to our dorm and watched movies and ate candy.
The moral of this long-winded tale is that Halloween is a fun holiday. Yes, the trick-or-treating is the best part for the children, but for those who have outgrown ringing doorbells of strangers for chocolate, it’s the time of spookiness, when you’re hanging with people you care about on an abandoned playground that make the best memories. So, this Halloween, dress up and run around in the dark, laugh and scare yourselves, watch a horror movie and eat some candy, and make the best memories you can, because when you’re older, this is what you’re going to look back on. Enjoy it.
