When I was growing up, my neighborhood had a ton of children (a fluther of children?), and so Halloween was an event. Most of the houses were decked with giant polyester cobwebs, orange lights, freshly carved jack-o-lanterns, lawn full of styrofoam tombstones, and just any other miscellaneous decorations that indicated witches or spook or an abandoned-decrepit house. My family had two giant spiders we’d hang in cobwebs that surrounded the walkway so people had to walk through the spider nest to get to the door.
And trick-or-treating was huge. My neighborhood doesn’t have streetlights, but with the number of families and groups of friends out with their flashlights, we might as well have. And of course, we all knew the house that handed out regular sized Hershey’s bars, and the house that had the best decorations (with a fog machine and everything, and the owners had decorated the foyer as well, and dressed up, so it was completely like an old haunted house.)
My mom is a fantastic sewer, and so every year my sister and I would pick out who we wanted to be for Halloween, and we’d scour the fabric store patterns with my mom for something close to what we wanted, and she’d talk us through how we could change it to make it exactly right. Then we’d pick out fabrics. There was a whole legion of parents at my elementary school who would sew the costumes, and so often we’d be in the pattern section with a bunch of other kids also combing through the giant pattern books.
My school had a carnival—every class would come up with a booth they wanted to do. Some of the classes had traditional booths—the seventh graders had the haunted house (in the breakout space just outside their classroom.) The fifth graders had the Halloween maze (they began collecting giant cardboard boxes at the beginning of the year to have enough to string together.) Etc. Every year the carnival started with the whole school gathering on the field in a large circle for the costume parade. And our principal would be out there with a megaphone and call out themes (“all the witches,” or “all the Hogwarts students,” or “all the household objects,”—we had students dress up as everything imaginable. Two kids in my class (one was my best friend) would have a friendly joust about who’s costume was the oddest—and one year one showed up as a washing machine on the spin cycle, and the other as a dirty basket of laundry!
Now, the fabric stores are barely hanging in there with their ever dwindling niche market; my former elementary school apparently no longer does the parade or the carnival; and the neighborhood kids have all grown up, so it’s a bit of a ghost town on Halloween. We don’t bother with candy or decorations, because there aren’t enough kids to get through one bag.
Of course, that’s not the case everywhere. Other neighborhoods have younger families, and so many of the kids still in this neighborhood join their friends elsewhere. And just last year I worked with a guy whose family was farther down south, but got about 1500 trick-or-treaters in a night, and go all-out with decorations.
Mmm reminiscing is nice.
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