Geezer’s Corner: Halloween

Well here it is two days after Halloween and I am still coming down off a sugar high.

We live in a medium sized subdivision with a fairly diverse demographic. It’s easy to walk around the subdivision so we get lots of traffic on Halloween. Between 4:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. we had 163 trick-or-treaters.

The most amazing trick-or-treater who came to our door was a momma Monarch Butterfly with her baby butterfly in arms.

We always get a large contingent of children, and they’re always accompanied by their parents who stand at the end of the driveway. I’m always impressed at how polite and well mannered the children are. It’s always “Thank you”, “yes mam” and “no sir”. Not the norm for our society today. I haven’t decided yet whether they’ve been brought up with good manners, or whether it’s just Mom and Dad at the end of the driveway with an iron hand.

Halloween always brings back memories of my own trick-or-treating experiences. We lived in government housing and it was a real treat to get store bought candy. Usually the fare was homemade popcorn balls or candy, sometimes an apple, and occasionally a penny. All of the kids avoided one particular house in the neighborhood because the word was out that they would “throw hot gravy on you” if you went to their door. I laugh now and wonder how that ever got to make the rounds of the neighborhood kids. Thinking back I never knew anyone who got the gravy treatment.

My mother was the one who always got us into costume for Halloween and I was either a ghost, or Roy Rogers (The King of the Cowboys). Being a ghost only required a tattered bed sheet; and being Roy Rogers only required a red bandanna.

When I was in the 4^th or 5^th grade my mother and a neighbor lady friend of hers decided to make my costume more elaborated. They dressed me up like a girl, with nylons, a dress and makeup. The works. We always wore our costumes to school if Halloween fell on a school day so I wore my fancy girl’s outfit off to school. I worried all the way to school that everybody would tease me about dressing up like a girl. I never imagined that nobody would recognize me in my costume. You can’t imagine how crestfallen I was when my “machoness” didn’t shine through, and everybody instead actually thought I was a girl.

I quit trick or treating about that time also, and didn’t take it up again until I was in High School. The reason was that I went to a midnight movie at the local theater which featured Bella Legossi (sp) as Dracula. I barely had the courage to walk home after that movie, and for years after that I would lay in my bed at night hearing vampires trying to get through the window screens or out of our attic. I wasn’t about to put my life at risk venturing out at night for just candy.