Halloween

These days, we end up on Gchat; she complaining about having too much mindless work to do and me simply complaining about another looming presentation. When we have to compress our thoughts and feelings into an expensive telephone call, weeks of events and feelings are compressed into an hour, though often it feels more like we’re talking to ourselves than to one another. Instead of asking what’s new in each others’ lives, we end up just making an hour of statements, usually following this form:
Me: “Tina, I have a presentation coming up that I don’t want to prepare for.”
Tina: “I went running today.”
Me: “It’s raining in Delft, so I don’t want to run.”
Tina: “We should go skiing when you’re back.”
Me: “Hmm. I don’t know what I want to be for Halloween.”
Tina: “Me neither!”
What to be for Halloween: the most important of all questions. Unbeknownst to most, upon reaching a certain age Americans start to fret profusely about costume choices. When your parents dressed you as a cute little baby in a pumpkin suit, it said a lot about your parents, though when you’re old enough to dress yourself as queeny LA aerobics instructor Richard Simmons, it reflects a lot on you.
In 24 years of Halloweens, I’ve covered all the old standards from ghosts, vampires, elves, 70s TV superstars, pantless college student, to less inspired characters (the time I went as myself and just applied a random different adjective to everyone who asked what I was).
Last year, however, was particularly uninspired, when (gasp) I didn’t celebrate Halloween at all. Knowing not a single American here, I was left to watch reruns of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown with a bottle of red wine and a box of stroopwafels. It seems in Delft, Halloween, if celebrated at all, is just another excuse to drink while wearing ridiculous costumes. Though there’s not a week that goes by that I don’t see some group of students heading off to another costume party, leaving Halloween to be yet another theme.
I used to love Halloween; my favorite of all the holidays, but now it’s been reduced to an afterthought. While continental Europeans have started to slowly embrace the day, they’ve managed, like with most aspects of American culture, to only take the most commercial aspects.  Fun-sized bars of candy show up in the C1000 in September but no one prowls the streets looking for tricks or treats. Students dress up as call girls or pimps and drink liters of bad beer, but did they think long and hard and creatively about their costumes?
This year I’ll be celebrating Halloween on a lone, isolated beach somewhere in Cuba with a bottle of Havana Club. I’ll have a good group of friends with me – architects no less. I suppose that’s the most important, anyways. It won’t feel like a real, American Halloween as the warm trade winds allow us to dress more scantily, but it’ll be my own, international version. I’ll bring my own memories of Halloween past while creating new ones on the shores of an isolated island with a group of international mates, creating our own new twist on an old, tried and true American holiday.

David Kramer is an MSc architecture student from the United States. His next column will appear in Delta 37.