Adults measure time in dates… the date
your mortgage payment is due each month, the date of your next physical, the
date of your next business trip.
Children measure time in events … the time you broke your arm climbing a
tree, the Christmas you got a BB gun, the grade you were in when you had your
first kiss. Childhood memories tend to
flow together, mingling like streams feeding a large river, until it’s
impossible to distinguish one from the other.
Only the major happenings of life stand upright, like islands in the
river.
To be
sure, there were the usual milestones in the life of a young Unimonster, as
well. My first kiss was in Sixth Grade;
my little brother and I got matching BB guns for Christmas 1978, over the
objections of my mother (thanks, big brother!); and I’ve never had a broken
bone … despite totaling a Cadillac that hit me as I dashed across a busy highway
when I was 15. But along with these,
rather mundane, highlights of my life are those of a more … unusual nature. And some of the most prominent “islands” in
the river of my memory center around my love of Monsters, Horror, and
Halloween.
Halloween
when I was a child was quite different from the two-month-long shopping
extravaganza that it is now. Now,
Halloween is celebrated by nearly everyone, of nearly every age, and is second
only to Christmas in terms of sales generated.
Halloween decorating is big business, with dozens of companies supplying
everything the home-bound haunter could desire for their porch-side graveyard,
from 99¢ hokey rubber bats to animatronic reanimated corpses costing hundreds,
even thousands of dollars. The same
people who go overboard when decorating for Christmas have taken to Halloween
with gusto, pushing the bar ever higher with scary, gory, creative displays. And
costumes have progressed far from the screen-printed vinyl pajamas of my
youth. Today’s parents routinely spend
$40, $50, even $100 on costumes for their children … and even more on their own
outfits, something of which my parents never would have dreamed.
In the
early 70’s, my peak Trick-or-Treating years, any house with a Jack o’Lantern on
the porch was considered decorated and fair game for a visit. We thought ourselves fortunate if stores had
Halloween supplies two weeks before the big day, and even then, the selection
left much to be desired. That never
mattered to me, as once I was old enough to know better the thought of wearing a store-bought costume was simply unacceptable. Store-bought costumes, at least in my childhood, were anything but scary. Rather than making a costume that would allow your average MonsterKid to in some way resemble Frankenstein's Monster, the companies that produced them gave you a cheap plastic one-piece with a picture of the Monster (and not a very good one, at that …) printed on the front, with the word FRANKENSTEIN in large block letters underneath. Add to that a thin polystyrene mask, with a rubber band that was guaranteed to break before you got home with the loot and a far too narrow mouth opening that cut your tongue every time you tried to talk, and it’s easy to see I wasn’t missing much by passing on the mass-produced monster togs. Not to mention the fact that, if you had to have the name of the monster you were Trick-or-Treating as stamped on your chest in order for others to identify you, then it wasn’t much of a costume.
No, for my
cousin, my brother, and me, only homemade costumes would do. As I’ve mentioned previously in this column, my
usual alter-ego was a vampire; smooth, scary, but most of all cheap ‘n’
easy. But that wasn’t the only creature
I was capable of pulling together on a $2.00 budget. I could be a very convincing zombie, with
some fake blood, some mud and dirt for that crusty,
just-dug-my-way-out-of-a-hole look, and some tattered clothes for the basic raw
materials. Once I was “Dr. Death,”
complete with saw, stethoscope, and blood-soaked lab coat.
Once
costuming was out of the way, then the hunt began for pillowcases. This was before the days of fancy
manufactured bags, buckets, and pails for the collection of our Trick-or-Treating
loot. We had two options—paper grocery
sacks, which were tough to carry and prone to tearing; and pillowcases. Pillowcases were strong, they were large, and
they were convenient. There was only one
problem with them. They were my
mother’s.
There was
no chance of us using her good linen, of course … we knew enough not to even try
that. But like everyone, we had some
old, faded, stained, ragged sheets and pillowcases in the back of the
closet. We had precisely three cases
with enough structural integrity to carry a load of candy: one was white, one avocado green, (hey, it was the ‘70’s, after all …) and one a
flowered print. You did not want to Trick-or-Treat
carrying a sack with flowers printed all over it … at least, not where I grew
up.
Our
preparations complete, we would set out on our route with the resolve of Caesar's
legions off to vanquish the Gauls. The
ritual was the same from year to year, never varying. We would wait until it was dark, and then
head out. We would then immediately turn
around and ring our own doorbell, shouting “TRICK-OR-TREAT!” when my mother
opened the door. She would grumble, but
nonetheless dropped a few pieces of candy in each of our sacks. Then the adventure would begin in earnest.
For those
readers who are parents of young children; no, our mothers and fathers weren’t
exceedingly neglectful or careless of their offspring. That was a different time, and only babies went Trick-or-Treating before
sundown, or accompanied by their parents.
We knew our neighborhood, and felt completely safe and comfortable in
it … even at night. That confidence was
doubled on Halloween, when we always traveled in a pack, constantly crossing
paths with other, similar packs doing the same.
As we passed we would hail each other, like old-fashioned sailing ships
meeting far out at sea. We would
exchange information on the houses we had visited; who was giving out the good
stuff, who was tossing out the cheap crap, who wasn’t handing out anything at
all. It was a cooperative hunt, and like
wolves word would’ve traveled swiftly of any threat to the pack.
Quite
frankly, it never occurred to us that there could be any threat … at least, not
the immediate kind. We had all heard the
stories about razor blades and broken glass in treats, of course, and our
parents always told us not to eat anything before they checked it out. We never were overly concerned about that,
however. Personally, I thought that was
just an excuse to give the adults first crack at their favorite treats.
Once we
had thoroughly covered the neighborhood we would stop somewhere, typically the
7-11 just down the street, and take stock of the night’s haul. Seldom were we satisfied with the results of
our officially sanctioned panhandling, but there’s a fine line between
persistence and obnoxiousness, and we usually tried not to cross it. Contrary to our parent’s instructions, we
would eat a few pieces of candy while deciding on our next move. Occasionally, we would have some change in
our sacks, from people too busy or too disinterested to shop for candy, and
sorting that out was a high priority. As
always at that age, if I had 25¢ to my name, it was going to be spent on a
comic book … ordinarily, it would be Batman,
Action Comics, or The Flash, but
not on Halloween. On Halloween it had to
be Ghosts, or House of Mystery, or The
Unexpected. Not that I didn’t buy
those titles throughout the year, but they were must-haves to cap off the
perfect Halloween night.
When we
finally did straggle on home, we would camp in front of the TV, watching a
holiday-appropriate Creature Feature on one of the local stations, as we
munched happily on our Halloween bounty.
My dachshund would throw herself protectively on the sack beside me,
snarling menacingly at anyone who dared approach it—especially my little
sister. This never failed to earn her a
treat; butterscotches a particular favorite, though she also had a fondness for
Mary Jane’s. The sight of her working
her way through a piece of peanut butter taffy was guaranteed to bring laughs.
All too
soon, the night would end. We would be
sent upstairs to bathe and prepare for bed, and as we scrubbed the residue of
fake blood and Hershey’s miniatures off ourselves, another Halloween would
officially draw to a close. Those days
are more than forty years in the past now, and I’ve known great joys in my life
since then, as well as the heartaches that all of us are familiar with.
But I’ve
never known pure happiness like Halloween nights when I was a child.
