A couple of weekends ago, Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief Joe Weisenthal went viral for criticizing a Halloween Dog Parade, calling such gatherings “anti-social behavior” and expressing his disdain for a phenomenon called “Long Halloween.”
Source: @TheStalwart
Source: @TheStalwart
By his definition, Long Halloween is when a holiday intended to be celebrated by children for one night a year is co-opted by adults who participate in numerous “Halloweekends” weeks before the actual holiday.
It goes without saying that being staunchly anti-adult Halloween party is a pretty unpopular opinion. While a lot of adults feel uninspired to dress up for Halloween or have outgrown house parties,they usually don’t feel this kind of contempt for those who attend or throw Halloween parties. They, quite simply, feel neutral about the entire ordeal, leaving those who partake to have their fun but otherwise staying out of it.
Halloween parties for adults are far from a newfangled Gen Z thing. Heck, even Frasier Crane attended and hosted child-free Halloween costume parties! The East Village Dog Parade has been around for 35 years. It’s not an outgrowth of the Timothee Chalamet lookalike contests that are actually newfangled NYC phenomena.
There is truth to the idea that the boundaries between things meant for adults and children have blurred over the past half-century. You can see this with movies originally made for children, like Star Wars and Harry Potter, that develop an adult audience, both upon release and over time, as the child fans grow up and are reluctant to let the franchise go because it has become part of their identity. Whether this is a positive, neutral, or negative cultural change is a contentious debate.
A common argument of the neutrality of stanning childish things into adulthood is that it doesn’t hurt anyone, which is a bit simplistic. It’s not a question of whether it’s harmful in a black-and-white sense. It’s a question of whether this phenomenon makes culture worse. In terms of movies, I’d say it does. Adults, being the main audience for superhero movies, nearly decimated the R-rated comedies and dramas that used to be the primary box-office fodder for adults.
This begs the question: Is Long Halloween bad for culture? Adult Halloween culture is actually pretty different from children’s Halloween culture. Kids only really get to celebrate Halloween on the day, usually because their parents don’t have the time, money, or energy for anything beyond trick-or-treating—and maybe a trip to the pumpkin patch when the kids are little. Single adults have the liberty to attend as many parties, parades, and costume contests as they please, and in a world where social outings are increasingly disappearing from culture and where going out is exceedingly expensive, having excuses to get out of the house and see friends and meet people with shared interests really isn’t that bad of a thing
It’s so common for parents to resent the freedom of the period of your life when you’re operating outside of the nuclear family. It’s also ingrained for people to performatively deny themselves something pleasurable out of fear of being perceived as childish. These viral tweets are a textbook example of this phenomenon.
Source: destructdisc
I showed those tweets to my dad when they first went viral, and he said something profound. “That doesn’t make any sense, because when you’re a kid, you don’t get to skip school because it’s your birthday.” Kids probably would take off school for their birthday or participate in Long Halloween if they could, but they can’t because their lives are much more controlled by their parents. As adults, we should take advantage of the privileges that we weren’t afforded as children. That doesn’t mean you should eat ice cream for breakfast every day (although I did try that when I was 23 and I lived to tell the tale), but you shouldn’t deprive yourself of enjoyment just because it’s the kind of thing your 12-year-old self would also like to do.
Having more parties, more events, and more parades adds positive value to people’s lives. It makes people better to have opportunities to socialize and stretch their creative muscles by figuring out who to dress up as. Some years I do three different costumes just so I can not repeat outfits when going to different parties! Going to events like these enriches life much more than sitting at home and scrolling through short-form video content, which is, arguably, a much more childish way to spend your time.
We all get to the point in our lives where being perceived as mature becomes a much more valuable quality to possess than it was when we were 20. There’s no reason that filling your life with Halloween parties, haunted houses, and fright nights should be at odds with living a productive life. It’s a waste of precious energy to try to perform the idea of a mature adult who has no desire for whimsy and fun. That’s a lot scarier than a witch or a ghost.
