November 2023 – The Slow Fade of Holidays
The Slow Fade of Holidays
by Madison Lysiak
The holidays hold a place in all of our hearts no matter who you are or where you come from Traditions and celebrations have been passed down for generations. We all express our love for these holidays differently, depending on their personal importance, but no matter what for most people even if they aren’t very important to you specifically, holidays are still a universal experience but for the past couple of years, holidays have started to slowly fade away. For example, this past Halloween, very few children had gone out for trick-or-treating and instead, parents resorted to going trunk or treating, a way of trick-or-treating, but in a smaller confined area with just cars with people passing out candy there. This form of trick-or-treating was originally used to provide safer environments for children to trick-or-treat in and for some people, that is still the case, but in a lot of cases, it’s parents being lazy; not wanting to walk around with their children as they experienced the holiday. Obviously, not all parents who do trunk-or-treating have this intent, and it is completely understandable if you are worried about safety, but this mass effect of trunk-or-treating has altered Halloween, and slowly made it start to fade. Due to this fade over the past few years, Halloween has lost its spark. It’s not an exciting holiday for children. Instead of counting down the days to dress up and go door to door with your friends to get free candy, it has faded out to another bland holiday for people where they don’t even think about the day twice before blocking out the holiday. It’s sad to think that kids now and going forward will never fully experience the way Halloween used to be. Of kids getting ready with their friends or their family and running door to door in their costumes getting Halloween candy. As the decorations grow fewer and fewer in neighbors’ yards and more and more people turn off their outdoor lights to imitate not being home for the night to pass out candy. There is no way to get past this fear of losing this holiday along with other holidays. It’s sad to think that if we can phase out smaller holidays so easily, and not even think twice about it, what will come as time goes on to the bigger holidays that mean so much to us.