Student stress hinders our ability to enjoy the season

For as long as I can recall, autumn has always been one of my favourite seasons.

No other season can compare to the beautiful colours that give every mundane day a warm glow — not to mention all the crunchy leaves you get to step on along the way.

The traditions that accompany this glorious season are also great. Activities like pumpkin and apple picking with family and friends, preparing for your gluttonous Thanksgiving dinner, getting your costumes ready for Halloween and just simply frolicking outside with the cool crisp wind on your face are what define the season.

These enjoyable memories I hold of autumn however, have been incredibly difficult to recreate as of lately. This otherwise beautiful time is plagued with the misery that is mid-terms, essays and the stress that is synonymous with student life.

Students are bogged down every year at this joyous time with copious amounts of schoolwork that leaves us little to no time to enjoy this fleeting season.

We anxiously try to make the grade or finish the paper; while the warm reds, oranges and yellows taunt us outside our window.

As we get older, we acquire many more responsibilities that need our attention, and tending to these things takes a toll on our leisure time.

It becomes increasingly difficult to make time for these traditions because we all seem to have better and more important things to do.

Not only do our schedules become denser, but also our spirit and enthusiasm for simple pleasures dwindle.

Halloween, as it was for most children, was my favourite part of autumn. Doesn’t everyone remember excitedly making a costume and running around your neighborhood in search of the best candy like rabid animals?

I’ll never forget those remarkable —and potentially life threatening — sugar highs followed by the most intense stomachaches.

I’ll also never forget that awesome house on my street that handed out Archie comics.

Though my mother forced me into my winter coat because it was cold out, which consequently covered my fantastic costume, the anticipation and excitement more than made up for it.

I use the term fantastic loosely, as I was Minnie Mouse for nearly 85 per cent of these childhood Halloweens.

But the best part was the end of the night, when we all ecstatically returned home to enjoy our candy harvest, still leaves me with fond memories. Sadly, this memory is perhaps the most lost of them all. Every year, the number of trick-or-treaters declines drastically, and the number of sexy kittens and cops increases.

Surely their mothers would cover them up in more than just a jacket if they saw these costumes.

The spirit of Halloween is slowly becoming lost in today’s youth and it is probably one of the more disappointing losses.

The costumes become more and more scandalous, the candy is replaced with alcohol and going home to enjoy your candy harvest turns into you seeing everything you drank and ate that day face down in the toilet or on the sidewalk.

A night that held actions led merely by the promise of candy has now been replaced with scarce amounts of fabric called “costumes” and — terribly, terribly misguided — actions inspired by alcohol.

Surely it would be peculiar to see a group of 20-somethings walking through neighborhoods asking strangers for candy, but it is disheartening to know that we will probably never enjoy the simple enjoyments of autumn in the same way.

We become busier people, making seemingly “important” life decisions, and that makes easy days like these feel very distant.

It is an inevitable fact, but we do unfortunately change, similarly to the cycle of the seasons.

Although we can always count on autumn to bring its familiar cool, crisp breeze, richly coloured leaves and golden sunlight, we are different people experiencing these old familiarities each year.

We grow up, find different things that interest us and develop “mature” tastes, inadvertently leaving the pillow cases of candy, jumping in the leaves and drinking apple cider at the farm, behind.