Post Halloween blues are a real thing.
You know that depressed feeling most people experience on New Year’s day when all of the twinkly lights have been taken down and your world is no longer made of tinsel and holiday cheer? Even worse, you are now committed to some sort of torturous new year's resolution, in addition to the holiday come down. There's a reason the suicide rate is higher just after the holidays. Post holiday blues are pretty normal, but for me, the real darkness comes after Halloween.
All my life, I have loved Halloween. I know that’s nothing special, especially for someone who has always had gothy tendencies. As a kid, I loved to dress up in those store-bought, plastic one-piece jumpsuits with the matching mask that you bought at the local drug store. Those masks made you feel like you were suffocating and barely hung on with a thin elastic cord, but it was a sweet torture that I eagerly awaited all year long. As I got older and outgrew the drugstore scene, it became the annual opportunity to freely raid my mom’s accessory and makeup drawers. I think I was about 9 or 10 when my mom looked at me and said, “I think I can make a gypsy out of you.” I had no idea what the hell a gypsy was but I didn’t care because it involved wearing red lipstick, which made me feel magical and would ultimately trigger a life-long love affair with crimson lips.
During my mid-20’s I saw the dawn of the slutty costume craze. Sure, we already had the she-devils in mini skirts and the classic Elvira getup, but when Leg Ave entered the scene, they started presenting women with what seemed like an endless variety of slutty options that reduced your favorite character down to a couple of strips of fabric and some hosiery. Just add stripper heels, some makeup and voila. It seemed like women were suddenly divided into two camps during Halloween:
1. Slutty Supporters
2. Everyone else
By everyone else, I mean the normal, the scary, the silly and my personal favorite, the nerdy, handmade costume people. My favorite holiday suddenly had an unexpected and overwhelming social pressure that I never saw coming. Most women gladly went with the flow and relished in the opportunity to wear skimpy outfits, but being somewhat of a feminist, I found the whole thing eye-roll inducing. I have to admit, this ruined the spirit of Halloween for me, for a handful of years. You see, my childhood memories of Halloween all revolved around family and neighbors, roaming our heavily decorated neighborhood with plastic pumpkins and glowsticks, like a small gang of candy gathering detectives. Which house has the best decorations? Which house has the gag that will make you jump and run back to your mom? Which house was passing out the full size candy bars? You know, IMPORTANT THINGS.
My favorite memory happened at the end of one particular Halloween night. My brother and I were scurrying home, after a very successful night of trick-or-treating, when down the block we see the silhouette of a tall cowboy. Mom pretended not to know who he was and said, “I think there’s a candy-robbing cowboy coming toward us.” As he got closer, we clutched our candy and realized It was dad. He had gotten home from a long day of work and decided to go looking for us, but not before throwing on a cowboy hat, a bandana to cover his face and some revolvers from my little brother’s toy box. With minimal effort, he looked amazing and I remember thinking he was my hero for being a grown man who was willing to get into the spirit, even if Halloween was almost over. I gave him all my good candy bars that night. Maybe I kept a couple. But that’s what Halloween was all about to me. That bit of magic. So imagine my disappointment when grown up Halloween started to look like a Pussycat Dolls show
Sigh.
After a while, all I could do was throw my hands up and accept that this was part of the Halloween landscape and it wasn’t going anywhere. I think my turning point was when I saw a well done, sexy Freddy Kreuger. I never thought I’d see the day, but there it was and it was very appealing. My resentment toward society about what Halloween had become was fading. There was no getting away from it anyway, especially once smart phones became common place and sharing selfies became a widely accepted form of narcissism. Social media fueled the fires via early websites like myspace and tumblr. Later, Facebook and instagram came along and people everywhere were getting the validation they were seeking by the number of likes their pictures got. As a result, the side-effect is Halloween’s undeniable growth in popularity and the rise of retail sales every year. To me, all of this only equates to more and more Halloween fun. More events, more pop-up shops, more people in costume, more things to look forward to! All good things in my book.
These days, planning and preparing a Halloween celebration is something that brings a great sense of calm, mixed with a surge of inspiration that can not and will not be contained. The crafts. The parties. The costumes. The treats, all of it. I start my planning early because the itch happens as early as Spring Break. When I’m having a particularly bad day, I pull out old October editions of Martha Stewart Living and slowly flip through them while drinking a hot cup of something, just to transport myself into the Fall. In addition to the surge of creativity, something special happens to the sun in the Fall. As it crosses the celestial equator, the light that filters through my windows is somehow warmer in color. More golden. I feel very connected to this shift and It feeds me, in a way. This is the very change that tells trees to start shedding their leaves. The change that says, It’s almost time.
With all of this build up, there is an inevitable low that comes immediately after. Hell, I start getting depressed about the end of Halloween during the days leading up to it! Someone once said, “Don’t you wish it was Halloween every day?” and my answer is always no. It’s the anticipation and the longing that makes the whole thing special, you see. The sweet delay and the count down. It’s all part of the experience. Even the part where I get angry at Christmas for creeping in prematurely, is part of the Halloween experience.
Once Halloween is over, we're trapped in a month or so of deciding whether we want pumpkin spice latte or peppermint mocha. Welcome to the Holiday Zone. The year is basically over. Life has no meaning anymore. Time to spend too much money on giftmas and wonder what you did with your life over the course of the past year. Bring on the end-of-year existential crisis! I’ll be attempting to cure my post Halloween blues with left over candy and horror movies, while stubbornly keeping up my spooky decor well into December - TAKE THAT, CHRISTMAS! You might also find me crying into a bowl Count Chocula, thinking of all the crafts I didn’t have time to execute.
There’s always next year.
Dinah is a digital artist and connoisseur of all things dark and alternative. Check out her spooky video adventures on Instagram @hallowmood.
