Remembering the ghosts of Halloweens past

I don’t remember grown-ups being as excited about Halloween when I was a mere lad. As best I recall, parents would drive us to an area, set us loose like a horde of miniature pillagers to roam the streets, then pick out the best candy for themselves when we got home.

Now, I think some of the grown-ups are more excited about the arrival of All Hallow’s Eve than the youngsters. Of course, today’s grown-ups were yesterday’s trick-or-treaters, and it’s time for us to get the good candy. I know a few folks who stock up on bags of miniature candy bars and other goodies for Halloween, even though they’re lucky to get one or two trick-or-treaters. But, they deal with the disappointment and force themselves to eat the candy themselves.

In my day, our selection of masks pretty much were limited to Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, the Werewolf, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, a witch and a few cartoon characters. Full costumes were available, but most kids I knew just got the masks, usually from the Ben Franklin store. The masks were plastic with the stretchy string to hold them in place after slipping them over your face. Most of the time you barely could see through the eye holes, and you had to slide the mask on top of your head to breathe. That meant you were pulling your mask on and off all night as you went from door to door.

Dressing as a hobo was popular then, too, although most who did that wound up looking more like Emmett Kelley than the guys hopping freight trains. Nowadays it’s considered insensitive and politically incorrect to dress as a hobo, unless you’re the Olson twins. Indian costumes are out, too, although for some reason Indian princess costumes are popular at grown-up Halloween parties, as are maid, nurse and lady police officer costumes. What’s amazing is they’re about the same size as the children’s costumes.

Living in a small town, we pretty much knew the folks at houses where we went looking for treats. They’d fake being scared of the spooky costumes and masks, and go, “Awww,” at the cute ones. Then, they’d drop goodies into our trick-or-treat bags, which included store-bought bags with handles, brown Piggly Wiggly sacks and pillow cases. We’d often be out of sight of the adults chaperoning us, but nobody worried. In those days, kids didn’t get snatched off the streets, at least not in DeKalb, Texas. That kind of stuff happened in big cities, and it was rare to hear about it.

Of course, we didn’t have 24/7 news telling us about every bad thing that happened everywhere in the country, which may be why things didn’t seem so scary there and why we’re paranoid about everything today.

By the time I’d gotten too big to go trick-or-treating, the world was changing. There were stories of people putting pins and razor blades in apples and fruit, and spiking candy with poison and LSD. It wasn’t long before homemade Halloween treats became history. Remember getting popcorn balls? They were sweet and salty and fun to eat. Little old ladies always spent a couple of days making popcorn balls to hand out. At least I remember them as little old ladies. There also were candied apples wrapped in wax paper, and homemade candy folks made for trick-or-treaters.

Now, those are the first things tossed in the trash. If it isn’t store-bought with a sealed wrapper, then a treat’s automatically suspicious, perhaps filled with straight pins and Ex-Lax, even if it was made by grandma. I miss those grandma-made treats.

One thing that has continued are community Halloween activities, although many have changed from being Halloween carnivals to being “fall festivals,” or “trunk-or-treat” so kids don’t have to go door-to-door. We had Halloween carnivals at Hubbard School, the four-room, eight-grade school I attended for a few years. Each classroom had different games, there were games in the hallway and refreshments in the cafeteria. The whole community took part, and it was a lot of fun.

I won some pretty cool prizes in the games a couple of years. One year, playing bingo, I think, I won a ceramic pheasant vase that I gave Mom. Another year, I won a small Polaroid camera that made excellent black and white pictures. I used that camera for years and still have family photo albums with some of the pictures from it.

Now that I’ve been thinking back on those Halloweens past, I think I understand why grown-ups now still party on Halloween. It brings back those fun times, scary times when we really didn’t have anything to fear, times to play friendly pranks, times we could pretend to be someone or something else, and times that, at least from our viewpoint, were more innocent.

So, what the heck if a grown-up wants to dress up silly and do silly things one day a year. Besides, we still probably haven’t recouped all that Halloween candy we lost to our parents.

Trick or treat, y’all.