Musings from the Middle: Halloween Memories

by Cathy Allie

I recently read that Halloween has passed Easter and Valentine’s Day and is now second only to Christmas for consumer spending on the holiday. That’s not exactly the Halloweens I remember growing up, where things were just a tiny bit simpler.

Right now shoppers can buy no less than five designs of sugar cookies in a roll to just slice and bake for Halloween. A witch, a pumpkin, a bat, an owl, and candy corn are all right there in the refrigerator case. When I was growing up, we had one cookie cutter in the shape of a pumpkin, and if you didn’t roll out the dough just right, it ended up looking like a lopsided circle when you baked them.

Today, there are purple, green, orange and black sugar crystals for décor; back in the day, we mixed up gloppy icing that never turned out a really good shade of orange because it was too hard to figure out the ratio of red and yellow food coloring. Recently at one of my favorite retailers, I saw an entire aisle in the home décor section dedicated purely to Halloween: pillows with skulls and crossbones, a doormat with jack-o-lanterns, a pumpkin scented candle, and sheets—yes, sheetswith witches stirring their cauldrons.

A few years back now, our only indoor Halloween décor consisted of coloring sheets we completed at Howard Johnsons when we ate there after church on Sunday, which we stuck to the refrigerator with Playskool alphabet letters spelling BOO.

Walking my dog tonight, I passed a neighborhood yard with a full blown graveyard with tombstones and another yard with six blow up figures ranging from Frankenstein to Snoopy, quite a display, and quite a drain on the generator running them all. I am a little guilty of Halloween overload myself, with seven hard plastic jack-o-lanterns plugged in to a power strip on my porch and a gigantic wreath with a shiny witch hat.

Living old school, when we decorated for Halloween, we propped open our front door and hung up a spindly skeleton printed on faded shiny card stock, made to look loose limbed with gold brads that held his parts together, and…well, there was no ‘and’. Our bony friend was it! We kept the jack-o-lantern inside in case pranksters wanted to smash it.

Pumpkin carving was not the art back then that it is today. Basically we took a black crayon to our pumpkin and drew triangles for the eyes and the nose, cut them out, and then let our dads carve out some semblance of a smile. And we just carved one ORANGE pumpkin as a family, which always led to a sibling fight of massive proportion.

Today, there are stencils and add on kits to make your pumpkin look like a Star Wars character or a super hero or a past President. No one would have thought of painting a pumpkin, because that would have denied you the joy of scooping out the insides, cleaning off the seeds and salting and buttering them for roasting. No one went to a pumpkin patch unless you lived on a farm—you just begged your mom to get a good pumpkin from the huge cardboard box at the local Kroger.

Halloween parties in my childhood neighborhood consisted of cake walks, musical chairs to scary songs played on record players, and maybe a costume contest which only one kid won, without everyone getting today’s mandatory participation prize. One really fantastic party had face-painting—but not by a hired professional using organic colors. We painted each other with tempera paint! We sometimes played pumpkin ring toss, and we bobbed for apples, which my germophobic self would never let me do now.

On the other hand, today’s parties are over the top. I saw a Pinterest post detailing a Halloween party where the culminating activities were a pumpkin toss and a pumpkin launch using giant elastic bands. This followed a pumpkin themed food buffet, an interactive photo wall, and dry ice lining the sidewalk. One definite advantage of today’s Halloween frenzy is the candy. In my trick or treating days, we considered it a pretty good haul in our pillowcase candy bag if we got Smarties and Tootsie Rolls, edible wax lips, wax pop bottles complete with fake liquid pop, and candy cigarettes, or a stretchy candy necklace.

Our local dentist did not give us dental floss or toothbrushes like Halloween urban legend, and in all those years I never saw a razor blade in an apple or any other item, but some of the selections we did get were pretty weak by today’s standards.

Necco wafers, atomic fireballs, Pez, Bit ‘O Honeys, Dum Dums suckers, and peanut butter Mary Janes, really pale in comparison to today’s pumpkin and bat shaped Reese’s, left and right Twix, and ghost shaped Peeps. Admittedly, I do kind of miss homemade popcorn balls conglomerations of freshly popped corn and Karo Syrup.

In a series of unmemorable costuming years, I was a cowgirl, a clown, a hobo, a princess, a gypsy, and a Raggedy Ann. Most of them were costumes that came from our home closet or a boxed set complete with a thin plastic mask held on by an elastic strip, from SS Kresge Co., Kmart’s forerunner.

There was no run to a thrift shop, no excursion to a store dedicated totally to costuming, no online search for the perfect look. And just so you know—my sister followed me each year right into a hand me down costume I had worn the year before. Poor girl!

In stores today there are elaborate make-up pallets needed for creating gruesome, garish effects to complement costumes. We just made great use of mom’s Tangee lipstick, applying it for both round clown cheeks and big clown lips. If we were really daring, we took her eyebrow pencil (yes, this was before the giant eyebrows trend of today), and we drew on extra eyelashes, fake freckles, or a single line, Snidely Whiplash mustache.

We trick or treated, not trunk or treated, and our pets were locked in the back bedroom while the trick or treaters rang the bell, not costumed as an avocado, a taco, a jailbird, a bee, or a ballerina complete with a tiny dog tiara. Although I have to admit that my boy dog’s RUFeree costume is always a big hit.

If you come by my house on October 31 this year, I will have Monster Mash and Thriller playing on loop, sitting on my porch with a cup of cider and a stale popcorn ball, handing out better than average candy. Happy Halloween!