By Katie Howard ’19

Westport has lush parks, competitive schools, and sidewalks clean enough to eat off of. We have everything: a good community, good restaurants and most of all, good people. But one thing threatens to disrupt this peace: Halloween.

Every year, this wolf in a sheep’s costume pervades the community and haunts it. And we welcome it. We welcome the darker powers in every streamer hung, costume donned, pumpkin carved. But, with each step further into the assimilation of this dark ritual, we further entrap ourselves with these demons, not knowing what it means. And once trapped, we are compelled by dark forces to “celebrate” this holiday every year.

As October approaches, the glorification of this Trojan holiday is ubiquitous across popular media platforms. Snapchats become adorned with pictures of witches, goblins and tarantulas, all pacified in their imagery to convince the children that they aren’t the threats they truly are. They will waste no time in converting the children to the the demons that lie within Halloween and force them to repeat this ritual annually.

The media presence that is so common among our youth has been turned against them, converting them into REAL witches, not just the fake ones they dress up as. They are (spell)bound to the dark spirits lurking in this holiday, whether they like it or not.

Between the pervasive “emoji spells” dominating Twitter and the sage-burning, rose-quartz-carrying, modern witch embodied everywhere all over Instagram, it comes as no surprise that more and more children are hypnotized by the dark advertising and commercialization.

Every year we send our children out into the frigid, darkened streets, wrapped only in whatever ill-fitting garb Party City deems acceptable.

Every year, each doorstep becomes plagued with the haunting, menacing, proverbial question: “trick-or-treat?” It echoes doorstep to doorstep, street to street, holding the population hostage in return for a Snickers.

This year can be different. This year, we can break our ties with commercialism and advertising and embrace creativity and originality instead.  This year we can break this demonic cycle, if we are brave enough.