Halloween is fast approaching, and there are countless ways to celebrate. It is a holiday perfect for community, fun and excitement. Keeping that in mind, let’s look at the many ways the Linfield community is getting involved, including the Halloween Hall Crawl, parties or just get-togethers with friends.
The Hall Crawl allows students to visit different resident halls, each with a different fun Halloween-themed activity, like a movie or making themed snacks.
Visiting or being visited by long distance friends was also a repeated theme, and multiple students said they planned to celebrate by informally hanging out with friends near and far. They hoped to do things like watching scary movies, eating candy and socializing.
“I don’t have a lot of specifical plans for Halloween, but I have my D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) group that week,” freshman Olive Panagos said.
Students talked about the likelihood of parties associated with Linfield students or the surrounding neighborhood. Some also plan to visit Oregon State University, both to visit friends who attend the school and to party somewhere with a bigger scene. The most common reason for celebration, however, remains the costumes nearly every student interviewed was planning a group costume of some kind, whether it was several people or just two.
A friend group I’m a part of is dressing up as Minecraft creatures, and Simone Brofsky, a Linfield freshman, said she and her boyfriend were dressing up as a redneck couple, as a way to pay homage to where he grew up.
Many of the freshmen listed changes that they were feeling about this year’s Halloween. Some common ones included no longer trick or treating, no longer decorating with family members, having more freedom to celebrate with their friends.
“I like that now I can come home after a party without my parents worrying,” Brofsky said.
Some say they are excited to explore this new facet of the holiday as they enter a new stage in life.
“This year is important because we’re not kids anymore, but we still need to nurture the inner carefree-ness we used to have,” freshman MJ Lorino said.
Upperclassmen also acknowledged some of these changes, but the sense of novelty around them was dimmer. They had already gone through their first independent Halloween, so they were familiar with the process. Generally, every student said that things like dressing up and decorating are long standing traditions that they are eager to continue this year, so while some things change, many stay the same.
This year, Linfield students are excited, and enthusiastically planning to celebrate a blend of traditions, old and new. They are participating most heavily in the social aspects of Halloween, as almost every single student mentioned their plans with their friends. There is much variety in the specifics of students’ celebrations, like partying versus watching a movie, but the Linfield community agrees that Halloween is a time to build connections.
