The Spirit of Halloween Past

BY KAT DELA RAMA & YEL DELENA

Pizza slices are all over the box, the Ghostbusters theme is playing, and the person with the weirdest attire one has ever seen just won Best Costume.

It’s Halloween again, and students and teachers alike are looking forward to what future parties have to offer.

The culture of Halloween is highly participated in by Philippine Science High School-Main Campus (PSHSMC), with school clubs and partygoers coming together to build a spooky event for the entire community. And with the culture’s impact on the school, one may ask: What was Halloween in Pisay like in the past?

Poltergeists and the primary years

At first, Halloween wasn’t that big of a deal in Pisay. In fact, Halloween celebrations were non-existent!

The idea of celebrating Halloween first entered the minds of the community back when Pisay had a daycare. In a bid to entertain the children of the teachers and staff, the daycare decided to take them trick or treating. The kids visited each office on campus, dressed in adorably spooky costumes, asking for candy.

This prompted a change in the perception of Halloween among the community. Though secular, Pisay was still subject to rather strong Catholic influences; thus, Halloween was seen as a night of devil-worship and witchcraft. But after seeing the innocence of the celebration, people started to think differently.

“[Halloween] was a little bit embraced,” Sir Franel Infante, a Math teacher who has been in Pisay for ten years, commented. “Not necessarily on [its] dark side, but at least on the fun side.” Ghouls and the growth of culture

As the Halloween spirit started to creep into the community, students and faculty began to dress up in scary costumes. For one day each year, you’d find vampires, zombies, and various other monsters terrorizing the school’s classrooms.

In recent years, however, these classically creepy creatures aren’t the only ones you’d find wandering Pisay’s halls. With the rise of cosplay, more people started wearing costumes of their favorite anime characters.

“[I’d say that we adapted] the Western standards to cosplay,” Ma’am Kiel Granada of the Math Unit remarked. “[You can] dress up however you want.”

It opened the gates for more creative and “terrifying” costumes, such as a Math textbook and a Tetris block.

The Student Council (SC) would organize Halloween parties to welcome the holiday, allowing the community to party the night away. The SC would set up photo booths and invite student bands to entertain the partygoers. They would also hold the Best Costume Awards, where students can showcase their Halloween costumes.

Thirteen sleepless nights.

These were what inspired Taylor Swift to write Midnights, her 10th studio album, which was released last October 21. Since then, the album has broken record after record, becoming the most streamed album on Spotify in a day and the third-most streamed album in a week.

According to one of Spotify’s tweets a few weeks before the album’s release, Quezon City had the fifth-highest number of Taylor Swift streams in the world — and a portion of those streams come from our second home.

If you were at the back lobby or at the Advanced Science and Technology Building (ASTB) that day, you might have seen and heard some students listening to the album with friends. You may have even witnessed people blasting it with their classmates while roaming the halls of the Science and Humanities Building (SHB).

As it turns out, Taylor Swift’s timing couldn’t have been more right. Since it happened during Pisay’s pre-exam hell week, this timely album release brought a sense of comfort to students and helped them unwind during test-filled days and studying-filled midnights.