I suppose I should like Halloween. It's like the dark counter-weight to Christmas: less uptight, no relentless pressure to be having a good time, and ultimately with more giving. And yet, I don't seem to get it.
See, whenever I hear an adult reminisce about their wonderful memories about childhood, they always emphasise how great it was to pretend. For this one day, a child can be anything they want. And to that I say, isn't that pretty much every day for children. If, as a child, I wanted to pretend I was something I wasn't, I just did it. I didn't wait for one day a year to get all my imaginary stuff in at once.
If anything, Halloween seemed to be a curtailing of a child's imagination, since you have this vague limitation on what you could choose to be. You were encouraged to be something scary. But not something really scary, just scary-flavoured. You could be a ghost or a witch or one of a number of other things children never voluntarily pretend to be. But if you want to pretend you're a three-armed alien from Alpha Centauri, people will look at you funny. Save that for, well, tomorrow.
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