Halloween evolves for each of us as we go through life more than perhaps any other holiday. Thanksgiving is always about food, family and football, and how one celebrates Christmas as a child usually has lifelong repercussions on your religious or commercial meaning for the holiday.
Halloween, though, naturally changes with us as we age. Most of us start with a candy-based orgy of concealed identity that transmits a host of antisocial behavioral patterns. Once our unannounced demands for processed sugar become socially unacceptable due to the inherent ageism of the costume industrial complex, Halloween becomes much more focused on alcohol consumption and the myriad ways an absurdly short skirt connotes "naughtiness."
This year Halloween switched it all up on us. Halloween itself changed so rapidly in 2009 that hardly anyone even noticed - until it was much too late. The final nail in the proverbial coffin was this week's showing of "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" on ABC. The cartoon usually evokes a great deal of emotion and nostalgia in me, and just as the gauzy strains of memory were falling gently onto my conscious mind, I was jarred back into our sell-out reality when Charlie began pimping for a new Disney cartoon.
Disney owns ABC and I am not surprised by the synergistic ploy, but they kept showing these Charlie Brown promos and digging the knife ever deeper. I almost killed my TV when Charlie Brown used the word "homies" when referring to a pair of digital elves. It was like watching Snoopy raped and placed bleeding on a medieval torture rack by a fiendishly grinning Mickey Mouse.
Vampires, once a staple of late October, now dominate popular culture year-round. While I enjoy vampire soft porn as much as the next American, we have to be culturally aware in these politically correct times and understand that slutty vampires were a scourge of Eastern European society throughout most of the late 1400s. It was acceptable when the pale makeup and macabre mini were only pulled out of the closet once a year, but now we live in an echo chamber of vampire sexuality.
Leprechauns, too, now hold an elevated place in our everyday world. Their single-minded investment strategy has these miniature Rockefellers extremely well-positioned in our interconnected global society. Rainbows may be pretty, but every time you make a wish on one you fund a new mall kiosk or radio commercial touting Cash 4 Gold. If you are afraid of our insane national debt to the Chinese, just wait until the Leprechaun Nation rises up (to waist level) and starts pushing us around.
UF's own King of the Leprechauns Bernie Machen has tried to spoil Halloween for Gators by outlawing fun-size candies and all candy wrapped in school colors. Unlike the rest of his leprechaun brethren, Machen isn't evil. He is simply following the other new American tradition of making Halloween the pansiest holiday on the calendar.
Next time you see a slut vampire or hear Charlie Brown call someone his homie, just remember - Halloween ain't what it used to be.
Tommy Maple is a graduate student in international communications. His column appears on Thursdays.
