Muljo, while I think you’re story and sentiments are probably pretty common, they’re also interesting (to me, at least) for what they reveal about our culture and the waning interest and “magic” that surrounds ritual time. Holidays have been commercialized - and in the process everything else has been taken out of them. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve got a Halloween fetish (I know it’s weird; I’m trying to figure it out.), but I feel the same way you do about a lot of other holidays. Lots of people probably do. But why?

Personally, holidays in general lost all meaning for me long ago. Of course, as far as Halloween is concerned that might have something to do with my mom being an extreme cheapskate about costumes the few years that I did express interest in trick or treating.

You know how it goes, many of the other kids at school come wearing costumes, you hadn’t even given it much thought before that but now you want a costume too so you can get candy later that night… and my mom pulls some playing card costume out of the back of the closet, I can barely move my arms in the thing but I wear it anyway… and the process repeats itself word for word the next two or three years after that.

I kind of stopped caring after that. It was amusing to see people still coming to school in costumes in high school (some people REALLY go all out and those can be pretty neat to see) but I had no more interest in doing any of it myself.

Oh wait, I just remembered that there were some years that instead of the stupid playing card outfit I had a Bart Simpson mask that I could barely see out of (no orange shirt to match it, just a mask). I don’t think I ever had any other costumes though.

As for my attitude towards other holidays (if anyone cares)… Well I guess it’s just because all they ever meant to me was “family get-together”. Sure, Easter also meant Cadbury Cream Eggs and Peeps, and Christmas also meant presents, but there isn’t much more to the holidays than that, not for me at least (religious context doesn’t apply to me). (The four month buildup before each holiday can also get kind of annoying by the time the holiday finally approaches.)

As a recovering long-time goth, it’s interesting to watch the way people act on Halloween and in virtual worlds. On Halloween, they dress up because they can, but a lot of people REALLY look forward to it, REALLY get into it, etc… When people find Virtual Worlds, the social climate changes to where they can do that all the time, and so they do, which accounts for the huge dark/goth/vampire population and item count around the world. Now, the “why” of that is kinda hard to pin down. You could probably get away with pinning it to the inherent marketed sex of it all, but I always wonder if there’s something deeper.

Now then, straying horribly offtopic… Saw your “I wanna go!” thing on the News column about the Austin Games Conference… I’m going (wheee!), and I totally didn’t realize the Frag Dolls were gonna be there. I may actually show up to that, as the only thing it conflicts with is the Secondary Markets talk, which I’m not to married to showing up to anyways. Seeing I think we’ve both got the same seering hatred for them, I’ll be happy to blog it for ya. ;)