HALLOWEEN…THEN AND NOW

 

When I went back home to the States for a visit the last time I was able to, before the pandemic put a damper on my yearly travel plans, it was in the lovely autumn month of October. It was always my mother Reba Mae’s favorite time of the year. She loved what she referred to specifically as “October blue skies”, the fiery changing hues of the autumn foliage, and the weather, which was dry and crisp and which she was wont to call “sweater weather”. I’m usually there a little earlier or a little later, so this was the first time since more youthful years that I was treated to the full force of the Halloween phenomenon. I have to confess that I was utterly amazed at what an elaborate celebration it had become.

As most of my readers know, I have resided for many years in South America. But Ohio is my native home and when I’m back, I spend a major part of my time in that state and, indeed, in my home town of Wapakoneta.

When you’re an expatriate, you see trends differently than people do who live with them every day. On each visit back home, you quickly take note of changes in slang and habitually used expressions, in the political climate at street level, in people’s general state of mind and in the customs that change with the passage of time. So the emphasis being placed on Halloween literally hit me right in the face.

The investigative reporter in my DNA couldn’t resist doing some research. I was shocked to discover that the business of Halloween—there is actually, believe it or not, a Halloween Industry Association—is today a ten-billion-dollar sector of the economy. In 2021 alone, American consumers were expected to spend an average of more than a hundred dollars apiece on Halloween. Decorations are elaborate and sophisticated, rivaling the Christmas decorations that have become ever more exuberant. Last time I was back, I spent several evenings driving around enjoying the competitive flamboyance of the staged Halloween mayhem—open graves with emerging walking dead, witches riding brooms over rooftops, bodies lying in yards and driveways, skeletons hanging from porches, and absolutely incredible, if lugubrious, light shows and window displays.

When I was a kid, Halloween—like just about every other aspect of life—was much simpler. Major decorations were for the Christmas holiday season. Halloween might include a single jack-o-lantern on the front porch and a poster of a broom-mounted witch and a black cat on the front door, and Thanksgiving might involve a horn of plenty, some artfully arranged squash and some posterboard turkey and pilgrim cutouts, but the only time when people went all out was at Christmastime.

The year-end holiday season always included rides in the car after dark to see the plethora of lights and decorations and elaborate wreaths and trees that adorned people’s homes. There were contests for the best-decorated houses and, in Wapakoneta, it was a town tradition that, every year, Dr. Herman would erect a huge, spotlighted Santa, complete with sleigh and reindeer, on the roof of his home and office, right at the corner of three major thoroughfares.

Some of the outdoor lights were incredibly elaborate and as children, my little brother, big sister and I were dazzled by the magic that they created at that most wonderful time of the year. But Halloween was a lesser blip on the radar, the highlight of which was trick-or-treat.

We loved trick-or-treat. It was fun to dress up in costumes and go door to door demanding treats.

Some of the kids from the more affluent families could afford complete store-bought disguises and went out “professionally” masquerading as Superman, the Lone Ranger, Frankenstein, Tinkerbell, Snow White or wicked witches. Some of those outfits came complete with elaborate rubber masks that were very resilient and durable. But we who came from less wealthy families had to get creative in making our own disguises.  The five-and-tens sold formed plastic masks that fit less than well over your face with an elastic string to hold them to the back of your head. The plastic was thin and delicate and the string was precariously stapled to the sides, so that, by the middle of an evening of trick-or-treating, one side of the mask had almost invariably come loose and you’d have to hurry home and have your mother carefully re-staple it in order to go on making your rounds of houses in the neighborhood.

Few of these masks were recognizable personalities. They were funny faces, or scary faces or devil faces or cat faces, etc. But only the more expensive costumes had masks that resembled TV or movie personalities and characters. The ones we bought in the five-and-ten had a very strong plastic smell and the material they were made from was so volatile and thin that, by the end of the night, your character’s nose and mouth were usually starting to melt from your warm breath. 

I remember one year when the family budget was particularly tight, my “disguise” consisted entirely of half of an old white bedsheet with eyeholes cut into it. I was, my mother informed me, a ghost—though I could have been easily mistaken for a miniature Ku Klux Klanner (which, if I’m honest, back then wouldn’t have surprised a lot of people in my town). She coached me regarding the haunting noises I was supposed to make. Back then, I was naïve enough to believe that I might actually scare somebody with my moaning, and beneath my sheet I imagined myself looking and sounding like the ghost of Jacob Marley, as interpreted by Basil Rathbone in the version of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” starring Fredric March.

But there was another year when there was a bit more money and my mother bought me a Robin Hood hat and a bow and arrow, three of the latter, all with small rubber suction cups on the ends so they could stick to flat surfaces but without being able to actually kill anyone—not even the evil Sheriff of Nottingham. On the rest of the costume, I had to punt. At least I had a pair of Romeo-style bedroom slippers to give the outfit an authentic finishing touch. While trick-or-treating, I had to do it with the hat and the bow, but without carrying ammo, since I had no quiver. Just my orange and black, Halloween-printed trick-or-treat bag—a junior-size brown paper shopping bag with reinforced paper handles, also available at the local five-and-dime (what wasn’t?!), which, arrows or no, I hoped to have filled to overflowing by the end of the evening.

That year was the first year that I wore a simple half-mask. It was black with cat-like eyeholes and covered the upper part of the face down over the nose. It reminded me of the masks comic book super-heroes wore and became my mask of choice from then on.

One year I was a cowboy (I had the six-shooter and holster rig and a cowboy hat from other occasions) and another year I was a firefighter (the plastic helmet was a freebie from the Hartford Fire Insurance Company and the boots were my winter galoshes), and still another year, I went out as a pirate (my mother lent me a scarf and a clip-on earring with a parrot on it, which I might have gotten her, also at the dime store, with my allowance for Christmas or Mother’s Day, and I had a rubber-bladed toy knife bought in the limited toy section of the local grocery store). As a finishing touch, my mother penciled a thin Errol Flynn/Douglas Fairbanks mustache over my upper lip with her eye-liner. But I left the obscuring of my identity to the carefree half-mask.

The haul some years was better than others. There was always a lot of penny candy—teensy rolls of Smarties, miniature Toostsie Rolls, little packets of candy-corn, gumballs and jawbreakers, licorice twists and Lik-m-Aid, little envelopes of Sen-Sen, Kraft caramels, dime-store orange jelly slices, little brown jugs, saltwater taffy kisses, peppermints and citric-flavored hard-candy.  There were the homemade treats as well, which I loved—Halloween cookies that were just like Christmas cookies, but cut in the shapes of pumpkins, cats and Casper-like ghosts, instead of like Santas, Christmas trees and bells and iced in autumnal orange, green and white instead of Christmassy red, white and green. I still think those are about the best cookies in the world. And there were also the quintessential Halloween popcorn balls, held together with a reduction of sugary clear Kero syrup. And then there was the occasional Halloween-decorated cupcake or candied apple as well.

But while those were delicious and coveted treats, they were also highly perishable and you kind of hated to get them early on in the trick-or-treating process. My father, Whitie, told a trick-or-treat joke about a streetwise little kid not more than two and a half feet tall, attired in a black and white skeleton outfit and skull mask who’s accompanying several bigger kids door to door on Halloween. When they reach one house and ring the bell, a kind-faced lady steps forth holding a large bucket of shiny apples from her very own orchard—the worst fear of every trick-or-treater—and reaching into the bucket, she, one by one, selects an apple and drops it into each child’s trick-or-treat bag. Each in turn politely says thank you—all but the little skeleton. He just stands there, as if stunned, still holding his bag open, a handle in each hand, and staring through the eyeholes of his mask to the bottom of it.

Whitie goes on: “So the lady of the house stands there looking at the kid with a quizzical smile on her face, until, finally, she says, ‘What is it, sweetheart?’ The kid doesn’t answer, just keeps staring down into his bag. ‘Is it,’ the lady asks, ‘that you don’t like apples?’

“‘No,’ says the little tyke, his voice quavering, ‘ya broke my goddamn cookie!’”

So after the first or second year of trick-or-treating, you kind of had your neighbors pegged, and gave the homemakers most skilled in the art of baking a miss until last call. That way, their delicate treats were on top. The apple-givers you skipped entirely.

The ultimate jackpot of the trick-or-treat circuit was, however, chocolate—the hard currency of the kid-world economy. That was another thing you knew after a season or two—who had no interest in baking or healthy fruit snacks and were perfectly willing and able to buy giant bags of miniature candy bars and Hershey’s chocolate kisses, or, better still, whole cartons of full-sized Hershey bars, Milky Ways, Mars Bars, Peter-Paul Mounds and Almond Joys, Heath Bars, Reese’s Pesnutbutter Cups, Zero Bars, Mr. Goodbars, Snickers, Clark Bars, Zagnut Bars and Bun Peanut Clusters, which they doled out one by one to every masked marauder who rang their bell. We knew who they were and where they lived and they weren’t safe until the trick-or-treat ghosts and goblins were finally all home in their beds.

When I got old enough to trick-or-treat, there was a little ceremony inspired by my older sister Darla by which we would sit on the bed across from one another and empty the contents of our trick-or-treat bags onto the bedspread in two separate piles. The idea of the exercise, she posited, was to make sure we both got a nice variety of treats. It was a sort of two-person swap meet, and she was the auctioneer. 

“Okay, here, I’ll trade you a couple of these Smarties that I have way too many of, for that miniature Milky Way…”

“But that’s my Milky Way!”

“Hey, what are you whining about? You’re getting two for one! I’m just trying to be nice!”

“Okay.”

“Now, here’s a shiny red apple that I’ll give you for one of those cookies—the pumpkin one will do.”

“But I don’t want that ol’ apple!”

“Shhh!  What are you trying to do, hurt the apple’s feelings?”

“Apples don’t have feelings.”

“Ha, that’s what you think! How would you know? You’re just a stupid little kid. Look how sad that apple’s feeling because you don’t like it. Nice going, eh. Well, okay, give it here, and here’s your stupid cookie back. But I don’t know how you can be so mean to a poor apple…”

Pause.

“Okay, I’ll take the apple. Here, you can have the cookie.”

And on it would go. I wasn’t nearly such an idiot by the following Halloween season…Well…maybe the third. So the ruse no longer worked and each of us guarded his and her bag as if it were full of gold-dust.

Trick-or-treating didn’t last very long for me. I was really big for my age, so, even though I didn’t have the ‘time in grade’, when people started saying, “Hey, aren’t you kind of a big…um…whatever the hell you’re supposed to be, to still be trick-or-treating, I figured it was time to hang up my half-mask.

Speaking of big people trick-or-treating, for several years, we used to get a Halloween visit from an adult-size witch and her adult-size cat. The costumes were elaborate and theatrical. A few years later, I probably would have found the cat disguise cute enough to seem quite sexy. Maybe even the witch costume, now that I think about it. In fact, a few years later, I would be finding just about everything sexy.

But anyway, this dynamic duo would go around ringing the doorbells of the people whose families they knew in town—which was just about everybody—and, instead of asking for a treat, would leave one for the children of the house. Hersey Bars were their gift of choice. That choice would make sense to me later when I found out that the cat was none other than my future music teacher Mary Lee Lament (née McMurray) and the witch, her sister, whose name I no longer recall. The reason I say the Hersey Bars made sense is because their father, Adrian “Mac” McMurray, who was one of the nicest men I ever knew, seemed always to be carrying a Hersey Bar in case he met up with a little child. He loved kids and would immediately win their hearts by placing a whole chocolate bar in their tiny hands.

Mr. McMurray, who was president of the locally owned and operated People’s National Bank, also used to send the children of his friends a Christmas gift of a crisp new dollar bill in a special red envelope with an oval opening that allowed you to see Washington’s dour face. I also recall my sister, brother and I receiving silver dollars from Mr. McMurray on our birthdays. He knew how valuable real silver coins were to kids. Nothing at all like bills. They were something you wanted to save. And I’m sure that was precisely Mac’s idea, lifelong banker that he was. I remember getting them from my first to my ninth birthdays

I kept those nine heavy silver coins with me everywhere I traveled in the world until I was well into my late thirties. It was then that I hit a temporary rough patch and literally had to scrounge cash from wherever I could. Suddenly, I remembered those nine coins, dug them out of their hiding place, and sold them to a coin-dealer in downtown Buenos Aires for fifty dollars. I remember coming out of the place, with tears welling up in my eyes, and saying a prayer of thanks to Mac McMurray, who had passed on decades before, for saving my bacon.

Clearly, the McMurray sisters had come by their generosity honestly. They came from the home of an authentically sensitive and generous man.