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I’m a total Halloween Grinch.
And no, I don’t mean that’s the costume I wear. I mean it’s the attitude I cop.
I was a normal candy-obsessed child, for whom Halloween meant an orgy of party-size Snickers bars and little boxes of Milk Duds. (I threw away the candy corn. Blech.) I liked Halloween well enough.
And I went to an art-focused high school where we all got up in elaborate costumes each year. Happily, this was long before the sexy-everything costumes. The sexiest costume I ever wore was Judy Garland in the "Get Happy" number from Summer Stock. (And for some reason everyone thought I was Liza Minnelli, which annoyed me. Anyway, that’s the kind of geek I was.)
But since Halloween has been wrested from children and taken over by adults, I’ve sworn off it. Adults in costume make me nervous. They get all uninhibited and stuff. Shudder. To me, costume parties are just one big audience participation event, and audience participation is an introvert’s nightmare.
My Grinchiness goes even further, though. I don’t decorate my house, keep my porch light on, or in any way encourage cute little children in their cute little costumes to ring my bell for candy. I know…I’m not giving back what others gave little me, but the idea of spending an evening interacting with random strangers who turn up on my doorstep is exceedingly unappealing. (I know a few of my neighbors, and they don’t have young children. It’s not a particularly kid-centric neighborhood so any who ring my bell would to be unknown to me.)
Halloween has gotten out of hand. We now have a Halloween season; decorations start turning up in stores in September and the frenzy builds from there. It used to be that Thanksgiving ushered in the holiday season (or what I call The Most Extroverted Time of the Year). Now it starts gearing up in early October.
But I am a conscientious objector. I hold out until Thanksgiving, when I can have a nice, introvert-friendly dinner party.
To my mind, Halloween is an extrovert holiday. What do you think?
Photo by William Warby via Flickr (Creative Commons).
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My book, The Introvert's Way: Living a Quiet Life in a Noisy World, is available for pre-order through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound. It will be released December 4, 2012, just in time for party/festive/family-togetherness season. You know you need it.
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