I love a dress-up as much as the next person. In recent years, I have donned the get-up of a Bavarian maiden, an Indigenous North American princess and a Playboy bunny.
But I just don’t get the palaver about Halloween. Dressing up, I get: fantasy, escapism and a reason to eat treats, sure.
But this American tradition that we have borrowed in almost every way is about ghouls and witches, gore and scary stuff.
And so many of the costumes and consumer goods in the shops are cute or odd, funny or whimsical – and absolutely not scary at all.
A little bit of history: Halloween, in the Celtic pagan tradition, marked the eve of the New Year – the end of the northern summer and the start of winter’s cold and dark that brought disease and death.
The night is when the living and dead blurred together, where tormented souls got a leave pass to return to Earth and do a spot of roaming around.
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Historically, Halloween was intended to be a night where you dressed as a monster or a ghost so you couldn’t be distinguished from any ‘undead’ who might be carousing.
To that end, costumes that make sense include a zombie or a corpse bride, a ghost or a ghoul. But now, there are cats, Pikachus, Taylor Swifts and Mister Beasts.
However, if you follow the idea through, maybe hiding your identity by dressing up as someone else also confuses the undead, keeping you safe from harm.
Of course, the United States took the originally Celtic tradition, bejewelled it and made it all kitsch and commercialised. In recent years, social media has picked it up and splattered it everywhere.
It remains a borrowed observance here, but its historical and geographical origins are long forgotten by most.
Not many seem to care. Americans now dress up their pets as well, spending $700 million last year on get-ups for their cats and dogs – a tripling since 2010.
And down here in the Southern Hemisphere, we are about as far from pumpkins in the field and crunchy autumn leaves falling as you can get in October. The sun is up early and cool costumes should refer to the fabric, not the style.
At this time of year, with the festive season and end-of-2025 festivities thrown in, it seems like a crazy, mixed-up, upside-down world.
Dr Jane Stephens is a UniSC journalism lecturer, media commentator and writer.
