Halloween Is The Greatest Month

So, here we are again, the greatest time of the year - Halloween!

I don't like Christmas. I never really liked Christmas. I might sound a little selfish here, but the best part of Christmas was always sleeping in and getting presents. It might have something to do with growing up in Florida and "the magic of Christmas" not being all that potent in ninety degree weather.

This is what the heat does to you.

 Halloween, on the other hand, I have always loved.

I love dressing up and walking around the neighborhood getting candy. (Yes, I still trick or treat. I am not ashamed). I love the crazy, elaborate, freaky decorations people put up. I love the weird paranormal/occult documentaries on TV and all the Halloween specials on my favorite shows. I love that I get to wear t-shirts with skulls and other morbid things on them. I can dress up like Wednesday Addams and I won't get judged because I'm just "getting into the spirit of the holiday".

My spirit animal and fashion icon

And that's basically what I love about Halloween - I get to express my interests and not feel like I'm being totally judged for it. It's the one time of year that I get to blend in with the "normal" people.

Except, the things I'm interested in - horror, the Gothic, the macabre - are kind of becoming a little more mainstream.

Thanks to Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, and True Blood, vampires are cool again. And people are going nuts over zombies thanks to The Walking Dead. Meanwhile, the Biography Channel seems to have abandoned presenting actual biographies about celebrities and historical figures and is focusing on Celebrity Ghost Stories and biographies about mobsters and serial killers.

Studying the Gothic has also gone a little mainstream with the genre gaining a degree of legitimacy in recent decades that it didn't really have before. A hundred years ago the Gothic was the barely acknowledged bastard red-headed step-child of Romanticism. Now,  most critics, such as Anne Williams and Peter Thorslev, no longer consider it to be a movement that happened to coincide with the Romantic Movement but ones that is a  byproduct of Romanticism itself.

It's a little like Halloween has become a year-round thing. Awesome!