Graphic by Lexi Marcellino

There is something about trick-or-treating that keeps kids coming out each year. Since its origins from a Celtic tradition to honor dead relatives, Halloween has evolved into a day where kids dress up as their favorite superhero or television character, hoping to get enough candy to weigh them down. While most of the candy I get each year inevitably remains uneaten for months afterwards, Halloween brings the opportunity to be, at least for a couple of hours, someone entirely different. This year, however, I realized that I am simply too old for trick-or-treating.

The decision to give up trick-or-treating, a monumental part of my childhood, was not voluntary. As I walked out of my house last year on Halloween, dressed as a Barden University Bella from my favorite movie, “Pitch Perfect,” my friends and I looked forward to the endless amount of houses ahead of us. I noticed that something was different from previous years as soon as we got to the first house. An old woman opened the door with a bowl of candy in hand. She was wondering why four 16-year-olds were at her house asking for treats.

At almost every house after that, it was clear that people would have rather seen little kids dressed up as princesses than some character from a movie they had never heard of. It had not occurred to me that my neighbors’ judgmental faces would force me to bring an end to a part of my childhood.

Halloween has always been a day of joy for me. It is when children can truly believe that they can be anything they could dream of. It is the one day in the year when your parents can’t yell at you for getting too much candy. While I attempted to continue in this sacred tradition, the critical looks from the adults made me feel as though I had been barred from it.

The alternatives to trick-or-treating are slim: watching scary movies or going to a party. Horror films, however, have never been appealing to me, and while a party seems the choice for many in high school, I have no desire to be in the presence of drugs or alcohol. With none of these choices as possibilities, I have been deprived of Halloween as a result of my “liberating” age.

This rude awakening did make me realize that it is probably a good idea to have a cut-off age for teenagers to stop trick-or-treating. The majority of the kids surrounding my friends and me were at least five years younger than us, but no matter how old we, kids, get, some of us still want candy.