As a kid, Halloween was one of my favorite holidays to look forward to. Some of my core memories from the holiday were treading around my neighborhood mad at my mom for making me wear a winter coat over my costume, and getting scared of the Ghostface decorations. But as I’ve gotten older, the weather has gotten warmer, and almost every house in my neighborhood is laid bare with not a single pumpkin or zombie decoration in sight.
That brings me to the wretched question, is Halloween dead?
“I used to enjoy Halloween a lot as a kid, but growing up it just doesn’t feel the same, and I feel that’s amplified by the fact that trick-or-treating is dying out a bit,” Junior Myelle Bartholomew shares. “I’ve only been trick-or-treating once since I started high school, but it didn’t have that whimsy that it had when I was small,” she continued.
As the years have marched on, trick-or-treating has been slowly replaced by trunk-or-treating.
Recently, I got to experience the trunk-or-treat firsthand as Conway Elementary held a trunk-or-treating event in Stafford High School’s parking lot on October 25, 2024.
I attended the event with my best friend and her youngest brother. I had never gone to trunk-or-treating before, so I wanted to see what the fuss was about and why it was so much more important than trick-or-treating itself. It sounded boring. Walking around the same twelve trunks for an hour didn’t seem as fun as making the treacherous walk through a dark neighborhood – pounds of candy slugged over my shoulder.
We let her brother roam free, as we lapped the parking lot about eight times like mindless zombies until it was time to go home. Sure, the trunks went all out with decorations – Coraline’s tunnel to the Other World and Inside Out themed trunks galore – but it still didn’t match the nostalgia my best friend or I had with trick-or-treating.
“I think trick-or-treating will get old to some, but it’s always going to be a classic. Other traditions like trunk-or-treating or carving pumpkins may fade out in the coming years,” said Freshman CJ Perez.
Surely, it can be an age thing. As we get older and mature, we simply feel “too cool” to celebrate Halloween the same as we did as kids.
“I wouldn’t say it’s dead, but rather people think once you’ve hit a certain age it would be weird to trick-or-treat. So, it’s a very much alive tradition, it’s just not as enjoyable to older people than it is to younger people,” Junior Oumi Dieng expressed.
For Halloween this year, I’m throwing on a simple yet recognizable costume, and hanging out with my friends. As I broke this seemingly devastating news to my dad, he was beyond shocked that we weren’t trick-or-treating. He blabbed on, asking me ‘what was the point of wearing a costume if no one is going to see it’, and I openly just said that Halloween didn’t feel the same as it did when I was younger.
