Halloweekend is about celebrating with friends and having a good time. So just remember to know your limits before starting your celebration and you’ll be fine. (Flickr/Creative Commons)
Congratulations everyone, you’ve made it to Halloweekend. The wonderful holiday that celebrates dressing up in ridiculous costumes and hanging out with your friends. It’s basically like the Halloween you had as a child with slightly less emphasis placed on trick-or-treating and slightly more emphasis placed on partying (sober or not).
Halloweekend is also the closest thing we have to a spring weekend in the fall semester. For those who don’t know spring weekend is the last regular weekend during the spring semester before finals start. It’s a time when students have the opportunity to cut-lose and relax one last time before exams.
It might seem kind of weird to compare Halloweekend to spring weekend but hear me out. After Halloween you know what’s going to start back up again? Exams. Some of your classes might have one exam, but that is the outlier not the norm. So multiple weeks of midterms. After those midterms we will all be leaving campus to go home for a Thanksgiving break. And then after that break, we’ll be back here once again for two weeks of class and then finals.
Now I know what you’re thinking: If we come back after Thanksgiving break, why don’t we just do “spring weekend” then. There are two reasons. (1) “Fall weekend” just doesn’t sound as good as Halloweekend. (2) Its freaking cold outside. It always takes a little while to get cold here but once it does it basically stays cold forever. No amount of alcohol is going to keep you warm during that time. If you go sober, then you’re really screwed.
So take my advice, Halloweekend is the spring weekend of the fall. Bearing that in mind, I have some very important advice: know your limits.
Halloweekend will be the last time you’ll have for the fall semester to really unwind and relax. Sure you’ll have some other nights that you’ll be free, but it will be the last night you’ll have a real reason to go ham. I’m not one to tell other people how to party. If you must know, I drink and I will certainly be partying this weekend. But when big parties come up, college students as a whole seem to go a little too ham.
A few years ago, UConn started turning spring weekend into a police state because unfortunately a student was killed during festivities. Every year during both Halloweekend and spring weekend dozens of students get in trouble for driving drunk and some students even end up in the hospital.
What I’m trying to say is don’t go so hard that you ruin the rest of your life.
All of us have good and bad nights out. The goal should be to always have a good night out and that includes making it home safe and sound at the end of the night. To get there you need to actually know your limits. Nobody else is going to know how many beers you can drink or how many shots you can take before you start feeling drunk. You need to do you.
If you’re preferred Halloweekend is chilling with friends (or alone) and watching horror movies, then that’s what you should do. Just don’t do anything that might jeopardize the rest of your college career. Go big or go home isn’t always the best advice.
Halloweekend is about celebrating with friends and having a good time. So just remember to know your limits before starting your celebration and you’ll be fine.
Amar Batra is a senior staff photographer and weekly columnist for The Daily Campus. He can be reached via email amar.batra@uconn.edu. He tweets at @amar_batra19.