Halloween

Halloween is without a doubt my favorite holiday and always has been since I was a wee lad. Coming from a rural community, you always had to create your own costumes since you really did not have the ability to buy costumes as kids do today. I see kids wearing Transformer costumes so sophisticated they are actually able to transform and drive around as miniature automobiles or thousands of small Batmen wearing bullet proof suits and throwing batarangs around maiming the poor individuals that happen to like the Joker and unfortunately, are dressed as him.

We had a very limited range of costumes we could come up with when we were kids. We could always go as a farmer but of course when we trick or treated, farmers answering the door put us immediately to work cleaning out the horse’s stalls and plowing the north forty. Another option was the scarecrow costume but for some reason it repelled crows but attracted all kinds of other birds, hence you would end up in a situation similar to that experienced in a Hitchcock movie. There was the tried and true bum clown costume, but so many kids ended up missing on Halloween night only to be found in neighboring towns, riding the rails and drinking hooch and forgetting who they were. One kid I knew came up with a brilliant idea about going as cow manure but the over powering stench he produced while in costume was an aversion to any other kid hanging with him not to mention doors being slammed in his face all night long. I had a friend that got what he thought was a brilliant idea of taking a pair of deer antlers from a display his dad had created after bagging a trophy buck. Greg strapped them to his head and painted himself brown and proceeded out the door. Halloween unfortunately coincided with deer season and you can still see Jim Brown’s trophy deer head mounted over his TV to this day. It has this very curious surprised look, similar to a human.

One thing we children did was to create a very complex trick or treating schedule as the holiday came upon us. You see, every town had trick or treat officially on different nights so if you were fortunate to have a parent that would drive you every night, you could trick or treat 4 nights in a row and possibly get 4 bags full of candy. Adults caught onto this after a number of years and instituted a program of tattooing our heads with different colored serial numbers, each color indigenous to a particular town. Some brave souls still attempted the multi town scam only to be pulled inside, have their number examined, and then were used as practice fodder for hunting dogs taught to catch their prey and bring it back to their masters. We always though this was somewhat of an urban legend until one day a kid transferred to our school. He had been horribly mutilated by dogs one Halloween night and his name was “Bone”. Our multi-night escapades ended since we did not wish to end up as Snausages.

We would pull all kinds of pranks on Halloween and the week leading up to it. One of our favorite was to tie a dummy to a rope and secure the other end of the rope to a tree. When a car came passing by we would swing the dummy out in front of said car which gave the appearance of some one dashing in front of the it. We would hide and sit back and laugh at the curses and yelling that ensued. There was the variation of this where we would just pitch the dummy by hand out in front of the car also with the same results. I happen to grow up with many kids that had the intellect of a remedial rutabaga. One did not quite understand the concept that you used a dummy in this prank and grabbed one of the kids standing in close proximity to him and tossed him out in front of a car. Fortunately he lived but it took a six hour buttock transplant to save his life.

One tradition I always loved was the hayride. The neighborhood would get together and have a big corn roast; Henny Youngman was usually the master of ceremonies. We would roast corn, hot dogs, hamburgers, steak strips and whatever else looked appetizing after smoking peyote and having a warped hallucinogenic trip. Everyone would jump on the hay wagon and be carried all over the property and it was always fun and exciting. This always culminated with the boys sitting around the fire and detonating fire crackers by lighting the fuse in the fire and tossing them before they went off. Unfortunately a large percentage of them exploded while being in the hand. The nicknames “Four Finger” and “Three Finger were very big at our school. One guy thought he would cleverly avoid the finger nickname and became forever known as “3 Toes”.

Stealing pumpkins was a yearly tradition and of course the greatest of challenges was to ascertain which farmer had carefully and lovingly raised the largest pumpkin in the county. One year I pilfered a 104 pound pumpkin. What does one do with a 104 pound pumpkin you ask once one has obtained it? Besides obtaining your first hernia, I had plans to smash it in front of the High School doors in a ritual of machismo to show I was the king that particular year in pumpkin heisting. Unfortunately some swine stole the damn thing from me the same night. He was easy enough to spot at school since he had obtained 3 hernias stealing it from me and could not walk upright. His modified ice pack jock strap gave him away. Super gluing his butt cheeks together and placing him in a locker for 6 hours cured him of ever taking a pumpkin from me again.

Halloween let’s me delve into a colorful, imaginative childhood which has given me indelible memories to sustain a lifetime. The anticipation, camaraderie, the excitement even the ominous feeling you encountered from the strange weather that sometimes accompanied that evening. It instilled in you not only a sense of wonderment but anticipation of what dreadful beasties or otherly world entities could possibility exist in the darkness even when there was nothing there. An emotion that still transcends time and I experience as an adult.

Happy Halloween!