When I was a young girl growing up in the ’50s, one of my favorite Holidays was Halloween. I loved dressing up in some home-made costume-usually a hobo because it was easy and warm (many layers) and running all over the neighborhood in pursuit of more candy than I could imagine and certainly more candy than was healthy. Our neighborhood, an outlying suburb to a big metropolitan city, was safe back then and my parents let me go with just a handful of friends. We raced along searching for just one more house to ply for more treats, feeling free and daring. My favorite house each year was the older gentleman who lived in what I thought was a mansion. He had bowls of all sorts of candy, and a bowl of nickles, and we could take one of each-truly the jackpot house and Halloween heaven for me.
Some how the thought of getting all that free candy had a tremendous appeal for me, even though I was not the eat-it-in-one-sitting-and-get-sick type of kid. No, I made it last as long as possible-and at least until the end of the year. And I think I usually competed with my older brother for the honor of seeing who could make it the longest. It was all good, clean, innocent fun.
Over the years it seems that the ghoulish aspects of Halloween have been emphasized more. The kind of decorating that is done now goes way beyond a few dancing skeletons, friendly ghosts and smiling jack-o-lanterns. A quick look at any of the big online costume sites will show all manner of gross and disgusting-looking life-size animated horrors waiting to be purchased and brought to life in someones’ yard, spook house or party with accompanying screams, groans and creepy sounds and music. Equally troublesome are the very realistically scary costumes. It gets a little over-the-top to downright tasteless for me. But I guess that’s the point.
I’ll take my “old fashioned” Halloween any day.
