To Dress Up or Not to Dress Up?

Friday, 06 November 2009 23:39

Halloween in Greenwich never fails to disappoint – the familiar standby locations of Park Avenue, Maher Avenue and Belle Haven quickly become filled with scores of kids, watchful parents, and teenagers dressed in a myriad of costumes, parading up and down the streets to collect candy.

The residents of these particular areas seem to take on quite happily the annual obligation of decorating their homes with haunted houses and spooky decorations, as well as handing out countless amounts of candy to the many trick-or-treaters they find at their doors. Having lived in this town my entire life, I have participated in this quintessential Greenwich tradition – trick or treating at one of these places, in my case, Maher Avenue – for my entire life. However, there was a time just a few years ago when I doubted that I could continue, and nearly stopped this annual celebration.

After entering high school, I began to realize I was too old to flip through magazines and search through costume websites under the children’s section, too old to have my parents accompany my sister and me to all the houses, albeit trailing behind in a group of other adults, too old to be scared by the handmade haunted houses and pretend coffins lining the streets, too old to play in the piles of dusty leaves gathered in giant piles on the sidewalks. Though I considered myself too mature for certain classic Halloween activities, I certainly did not think myself too old to gorge on bags of candy late on Halloween night, or to plan elaborate costumes with my friends, or to carve Jack-O-Lanterns. The challenge thus became to redefine a holiday in new terms, to celebrate the same holiday in light of growing older and becoming in many ways, a new person.

When young children dress up for Halloween, they often truly consider themselves as having transformed into the character of their costume; as one grows older, however, such a mental transformation, following the physical change that occurs by putting on a costume, becomes much harder with the new sense of reality that inevitability comes with increasing age. Nevertheless, Halloween remains for us older kids a time to change ourselves, if only temporarily, and remove ourselves from our normal lives. This year, my friends and I are truly transforming in such a way – by dressing up as each other. Complete with each other’s clothing styles, accessories and demeanors, we are pretending to be one another, essentially immersing ourselves in each other’s lives for one day. Though it is not exactly the same as dressing up as a fairy, princess pirate or ghost, the spirit of changing oneself, of becoming someone else for a night, remains the same.

Even as we grow older, it is so important to uphold the traditions that have characterized our years since childhood. Such annual rituals provide a way of marking time gone by and connecting us to our past. Besides, without dressing up, where would we get our Milky Ways, our Snickers, our Starbursts and our Kit-Kats to eat on Halloween night?