Halloweens Gone By
October 31, 2012
Halloween has always been among my favorite holidays. Candy, costumes, parties. Pumpkins, apple-bobbing, bonfires. I don’t go in much for scary things, whether movies or haunted houses, but I love the spirit of Halloween. The fun of it all.
One of the first Halloweens I remember happened when I was in Kindergarten. For my costume that year I went as Punky Brewster (remember her?), complete with smiling sun pigtail hair ties. To this day, that is still my favorite Halloween costume. Although, I have to say, coming in a close second, is the time a few years ago I dressed as Mary Catherine Gallagher (Superstar!) for a Halloween party. Everyone loved it, especially the tipsy and intoxicated. I think I smelled my fingers after tucking them into my armpits about a hundred times that night.
When I was in elementary school, we used to beg our parents to take us trick-or-treating on Haver Drive in our small Ohio town. Haver Drive was basically a single-street subdivision. I don’t know how many houses actually stood on it, but to our childish eyes, it seemed like a million – the Candy Mecca. The few times we did actually get to trick-or-treat there, we came home with enough candy to last months. And sore feet from walking the long distance.
Another memorable Halloween happened the year we moved to South Carolina. We’d only lived in our house for a little over a month, so we didn’t know many people. I was barely seventeen and agreed to take my youngest siblings (ages 9, 5 and 3) trick-or-treating. To be honest, I think I was looking forward to it as much as they were since we now lived in a huge subdivision of several hundred houses. I dressed as a black cat, matching my three-year-old sister, while my five-year-old brother wore a pumpkin costume, and the nine-year-old, my brother Jeff, wore a box wrapped in paper to go as a present, a gift. It was somewhat last minute decision, what with the craziness of the cross-country move and all, so all of our costumes had been pulled out of a box of costume items we already owned or quickly hand made.
The two youngest only made it down our street and one other before I returned them home. But not before we stopped at our new neighbors across the street, who remarked that I looked amazing for having had six kids. I had to politely correct her and tell her I was the oldest daughter, not the mother, but I was privately horrified that she could think I looked old enough to have so many children.
After ditching the youngest two, Jeff and I took off down the street, prepared to hit every house in the subdivision. Unfortunately, an annoying gang of teenage boys decided to follow behind us, exclaiming how creative my brother was to go dressed as a box. In the way of adolescents, they wouldn’t be persuaded otherwise, so we were forced to try to ignore them as best we could. However, the nicest turn came a few houses down the street when a kind lady gushed over Jeff’s originality in dressing up as an aquarium. (The wrapping paper around Jeff’s box had swimming fish on it.) We decided not to correct her. And for the rest of the night, that’s what he was – an aquarium. A much better costume than a simple birthday present. |
