Halloween

The holiday season officially begins the day after Thanksgiving. But somehow, Halloween seems like it may the real start.

I don't mean the fact that Christmas shopping displays will now be popping up. (Actually, these days, signs of Christmas pop up well before October in some stores. I don't entirely joke when I say that one day stores will open the day after Christmas with a display for the next year's Christmas.) But Halloween somehow feels like a start. At least a hint of the coming holiday season. It's the first holiday milestone of fall.

It certainly was a milestone growing up. It was the first point in the calendar to alleviate the school year monotony. We didn't get the day off—in fact, I don't think we got any holidays until Veteran's Day—but we got the afternoon off from school work in elementary school. We'd have a Halloween party.

But the party wasn't the only fun. There were fun decorations picturing black cats and witches. Plus there were jack o'lanterns. Real jack o'lanterns, that is, which were carved out of a pumpkin. None of that paint a face on a pumpkin business! And the carvings were simple faces, and we'd carve with a plain knife. No fancy designs, as one sees sometimes today. No fancy carving sets, either. (I will admit: I admire some of those designs. But somehow, the old chunky faces crafted by a paring knife seem more "Halloween" to me.) My family's jack o'lantern would be lit on Halloween night—and lit with a real candle.

I remember the attachment I felt to that jack o'lantern every year. It would get carved, and lovingly placed on the porch about Halloween. And it would stay there well past Halloween, just like a Christmas tree might linger and linger... But jack o'lanterns—at least in the Seattle area—don't age well on the porch. Decay would set in sooner or later, and slowly the jack o'lantern would start collapsing. (And probably molding, too.) It finally would get dumped in mid to late November.

One year, my family hosted Thanksgiving. When the pumpkin pie was served, my father made a crack that the pumpkin in the pie came from the jack o'lantern that had been scraped off our porch just a few days before.

Then, of course, there was the fun of costumes. Many (most?) years, they were home made by my mother. I was Sylvester or a Sylvester-like cat one year. I think that might have been actually two years, although part of the costume didn't fit the following year. I only remember wearing a commercial costume (I think Casper the Friendly Ghost) maybe once. Today, I wish I'd better appreciated the time and creativity my mother put in back then...

Trick or treating, of course, was a routine. One year, I had a bad cold, and I kicked up a huge fuss when my mother said I should stay home. Eventually, after calling the doctor, she relented...but only if I wore a heavy coat. That probably ruined the costume's effect...but at least I was able to go!

Every year, I'd head out probably just about dark, with a plastic jack o'lantern candy bucket in hand. Back then, we were on standard time by Halloween, and so it would be dark by six. I went out with my mother, and my father would stay behind and hand out candy. I remember at least one year, my mother and I came back to our house while we were making the rounds. My mother stayed well out of sight, and I tried to pass myself off as another kid. One would suspect that my father probably saw through it...and so the only sucker was the one he gave me.

But there was a dark side to trick or treating even then. There was always a risk of getting hit by a car, of course. There was also a risk of bad treats. I don't mean just a candy one hates! But even then, there were stories about razor blades in apples, and poison in candies. One safety tip given in school was that we should have our candy carefully inspected by our parents to make sure the wrapper was 100% intact, and there were no suspicious hypodermic syringe holes to be found.

I know the possibility of poison really scared me... Although, truth be told, my neighborhood was probably pretty safe.

The only scary incident I recall really didn't involve me directly. It was a problem one woman a nearby street had. I remember her as a nice, grandmotherly type. She lived alone. And one year, she was very cautious about opening the door. She made sure it was only a kid there, and that the only adult was several yards away. Apparently, some unsavory types had been prowling her property that night... Taking advantage, one assumes, of a strange night when one might not notice anything out of the ordinary.

I can't remember the last year I trick or treated. Probably the year I was in sixth grade as a guess. It wasn't so much that I'd gotten tired of it—how could a kid get tired of free candy?!?—but I had reached a sad age when my family decreed I was too old for trick or treating.