🌻I just love Halloween so much THAT IT STRESSES ME OUT
Or: Why we’re not hosting a Halloween party this year.
Hi friends!! How are we doing!! I hope you are enjoying my favorite time of year: SPOOKY SEASON!
Earlier this week I was an anxious ball of nerves, which lately happens every year around this time. I never understood why, given that it’s my favorite season. Shouldn’t I be THRIVING during this, the most wonderful time of the year? Isn’t this MY season?
I always wondered whether it’s just the weather doing weird things to my mental health (vitamin D perhaps?) or some sort of back-to-school or impending-winter PTSD from my past lives. Although it could be those things also, I think I finally have the main source figured out.
Last week or so, I was chatting with a friend about our shared love for all things Halloweeny, and she said that her heightened love actually brings with it a heightened anxiety. That she just loves it all so much that she feels pressure to do all the things to make sure she’s enjoying it to the fullest and doesn’t miss out.
That is totally it. I have never felt so seen. (Thanks D.J.)
There are only a a few short weeks each year that you can catch a hay ride, or explore a corn maze, or drink hot apple cider, or carve a pumpkin, or watch Hocus Pocus, or go to a witchy-themed pop-up bar, or put a swirl of bats up on your wall, or or or or… it’s a lot. When you really love Halloween, there are SO many fun things to do, and such a short window to do them in.
Worse, there’s only maybe a single day that you can expect your less-enthused-about-Halloween friends to don a costume and drink a cocktail that you’ve turned black with activated charcoal and served out of a plastic cauldron. Miss that opportunity and you’ll have to wait an entire year to try again.
And worst of all: aPpArReNtLy a lot of people really aren’t into Halloween at all. This boggles my mind. Do I really have to wear a costume to the costume party? I don’t like Halloween, I don’t like scary stuff. Meh, I’ve never been a Halloween person.
This wouldn’t matter except that the modern Halloween celebration, in my vision, is a major community event. It doesn’t really work if you’re by yourself. If I put eyeballs in my punch bowl just for me, people might start to talk.
I truly didn’t know Halloween’s popularity wasn’t universal until the last few years. Is it regional or something? Only in college towns? A trend that peaked in the 1990’s and has been slowly dying ever since? (This isn’t rhetorical, if you have theories I want to hear them.)
2019 was my first glimmer of a non-Halloween. We were in Milwaukee, and on October 31st, Andy and I put our costumes on and went out to the bars, as you do. Our first stop was our local West Allis dive, The Buzzard's Nest, which was packed—with a very serious darts tournament. We pushed through the crowd, everyone in their dart league uniforms, gathering dirty looks. We made it up to the bar just to turn around and walk right back out. We looked online and found a place nearby advertising a Halloween party (costume contest! cash prizes!) and headed there—this time walking into a mostly-empty bar, again the only ones in costume. We did not stick around to claim our prize.
Then Halloween 2020 was, well, in 2020. I did still put on a costume, though, because that’s what you do on Halloween.
By October 2021, we had moved to Kansas City and made some new friends. Knowing we loved the holiday, a family we adore invited us to come trick-or-treating with them. They even had a group costume planned! Lord of the Rings! I LOVE a group costume—there’s just something extra special about having your coordinated crew, united in the festivities. Some of my most beloved Halloween memories are group costumes.
And so I happily worked on my best Galadriel to join the crew.
Unfortunately, Andy had surgery to repair his achilles days before, so he was stuck home on the couch with his painkillers.
And unfortunately, upon arriving to the festivities, I learned that they my friends had changed their mind about the group costume.
Really striking out here, folks.
We still had a lovely time, and I was perfectly happy to walk the neighborhood with Frodo, a ninja, a hunter, and Mom. Afterward, I met up with some other friends who hosted a small get-together in the evening, and their epic Jack and Sally “Nightmare Before Christmas” costumes gave my Halloween spirit a major boost. (I regret not taking a photo.)
The next year, October 2022, it was time to get serious. If we wanted big Halloween to happen, we needed to make big Halloween happen.
We decided to have a big blow-out bash. BIG. We invited over 90 people (literally everyone we knew in the area). We spent a TON of time (and money) on decorations and food and drinks, making a custom cocktail menu and setting everything up just so. Two fire pits. Real scarecrow. Every room decked out. It was, if I may toot my own horn, incredible. People who came told us it was better than the Halloween pop-up bars they’d been to.
The pictures don’t do it justice.
Alas.
I kept track of invitations and RSVPs in a note on my phone, which means I was able to dig up the exact numbers for you: 93 invites. 37 never replied. 27 no’s. 29 yes’s. Nine(!) of the 29 bailed last minute or no-showed, and most of the remaining 20 stopped by but didn’t stick around.
We had a great time with our skeleton crew, but man, talk about demoralizing.
We hosted again last year, October 2023, with much lower expectations and fewer invitations sent. It went really well. Many people came, and I learned my lesson and didn’t count invites or attendees. Still, we genuinely had to fight the “no one even wants this” feeling leftover from the year prior.
We decided to stay home on the 31st for the first time to pass out candy, figuring our yard full of gravestones, ghosts, and fog would draw a decent crowd.
Three groups of trick-or-treaters came to the door. Three!
What is going on!
Halloween is the absolute best, but it’s because it’s the best, that Halloween is hard.
This year, we’re taking the year off from hosting what’d like to be our annual Halloween party. Friends have started to inquire why not, and my reply is always “it’s just a lot.” But I’m only now realizing that it’s not that it’s a lot of work (although it is)—it’s actually that it’s emotionally hard to love something so hard and yet feel like you’re pulling teeth trying to get other people to even tolerate it enough to show up.
I hope we’ll have a Halloween party again next year. (Halloween is on a Friday in 2025!) But for this spooky season, I’m just making the most of what’s in front of me. I can watch as many movies as I want in my basement (which is decorated to the nines). I can light way too many candles. I can still go to the Worlds of Fun (the local theme park) Halloween Haunt and maybe serve a friend or two a cocktail turned black with activated charcoal.
And that’s plenty. We have at least two full bins of decorations that we didn’t put out this year. I have no plans to catch a hay ride, or explore a corn maze, or drink hot apple cider, or carve a pumpkin, or go to a witchy-themed pop-up bar, or put bats on my wall or gravestones in my yard. And I will certainly not be hunting down any RSVPs.
Thankfully, a few Halloween-fan friends have agreed to go to a costume bar crawl downtown next Saturday—finally putting something on the calendar for that one day there’s any hope of friends in costumes. We invited our whole extended crew, but if it stays just the six of us, so be it.
You can lead your friends to a punch bowl with eyeballs in it, but you can’t make them drink.
Field work
I am pleased to report that I had a fabulous time at the Natural Areas Conference last week! My pink booth was a huge hit and I got to connect with SO many old and new friends. Maybe I’ll tell you more about it another time.
Goodie bin
Funk files
My parents came to visit this weekend and it was lovely. We went to the Oregon Trail museum in Independence! It was small but nice. And there was a surprise at the end… a computer to play the original OT game, which is even more engaging after you’ve freshly learned the full story of the American wagon trails.
I have never been to The Buzzard's Nest, but it's near my childhood home so I drove past it constantly! Bummer that it was a bust, but hoping 2025's Halloween is a spooky one!! 👻