On Halloween, we remove our costumes and replace them with something less absurd.
I’ve spent the bulk of my lifetime masquerading as someone else—someone smarter, more talented, more creative, more politically active, more accomplished, and more likable. My daily costume is as someone less basic, a projection of who I want others to perceive me as. It’s an amalgamation of the people I’ve most admired through the years, comprised within an unassuming package. And this makes me normal.
We’re all living every day as though it were a more subdued and boring version of Halloween, masquerading as our own misperceptions of what we assume others want us to be. Some do it more obviously than others, wearing what could be seen as uniforms for whatever social group they identify most closely with. This uniform could be informed by a multitude of cultural influences, including music, fashion, politics, sports, gang affiliation, religion, etc. For some, it’s a look that’s in ongoing flux, grasping at whatever’s trending. For others, they find their lifelong outward identity and stick with it for decades. As a lifelong loner, I’ve never strongly identified with any group. So, my uniform is a more subdued, less confident appearance. And I’d rather not be put into a box upon first glance, but surely no one ever wants to be.
It goes far beyond outward appearance. We come to job interviews, speaking as though we’re exceptionally hard workers with big dreams, when all we really want is something that isn’t soul-sucking that will enable us to make enough money for a modest life. We’re all posturing for an audience that’s probably barely paying attention because they’re too busy worrying about how they’re being perceived. As we spend our daily lives deceiving everyone we come into contact with, we’re mostly just deceiving ourselves into a state of complacency.
On Halloween, we remove our costumes and replace them with something less absurd.
Like any normal American child in the 80s, I participated annually in the Halloween tradition of wearing a costume and roaming door to door to ask for candy. Though I never developed much of an interest in dressing up and pretending to be something else, the candy proved to be a strong incentive. While others would spend countless hours on elaborate costumes, my efforts were minimal and unmemorable. Aside from a store bought Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles costume, my childhood memories of Halloween have evaporated from my mind. I chose Michaelangelo. He was the party dude with the sweet nunchucks—which I undoubtedly hit my brother with at my own future peril.
While living in New York City in the 2000s, I experienced an entirely different side of Halloween. The city’s annual parade in the West Village is legendary, but the experience of riding the subway and walking the streets during the weeks leading up to October 31st is even wilder. The streets and subway lines of NYC are a mind-boggling cross-section of people at any moment in time during the year. Over the top costumes just take it to another level entirely, especially in the post-last-call hours when drunken stupor, exhaustion, dejection and the events of the night become an integral part of the costume. And then there’s the dogs in costumes. Only a sociopath wouldn’t enjoy that.
Though my enjoyment of observation, Halloween has possibly become my favorite holiday over the years. Still, I have little desire to participate by putting any significant thought into the creation of a costume. That’s not who I am—and despite a rather chronically-wounded sense of self, I have little desire to even temporarily pretend to be anyone or anything else. Or maybe it’s that without a satisfactory grasp of my own personal identity, it’s just too challenging to imagine assuming a different identity.
The holiday dates back centuries, with no truly agreed upon point of origin. And unlike other major holidays celebrated in America, Halloween lacks a direct connection to religion or a historical relevance. We maintain the weird rituals based on tradition and collective enjoyment. The Satanic Panic, religious fundamentalism and bullshit stories of razor blades in apples did little the curtail the popularity of Halloween in the latter part of the 20th century. People even found ways to enjoy make it fun during a pandemic.
It’s hard to escape the conventional, mass-produced costumes of characters from popular culture, but when you do amazing things happen. In the heyday of the Bauhaus, Oskar Schlemmer hosted costume parties which should act as the precedent for all future costumes.
And while not everyone can be as creatively skilled as those of the Bauhaus, Ossian Brown’s collection of anonymous American Halloween costumes from 1875 to 1955 showcases that anyone can make the most terrifyingly creepy costumes with whatever they have lying around at home.
Although costumes are generally something we use to hide behind, they’re also an act of self-expression that ultimately reveals loads about who we are. It’s funny how that works. Often times, the more we attempt to hide who we are, the more we let slip out into the open for all to see. This can all be summed up within the chorus to the song “Every Halloween” by Howth, in which songwriter Carl Creighton sings the perfect line “Every Halloween, we dress as freaks. Every Halloween, we dress up as ourselves.”