We just passed October 31st, more famously known as Halloween! Our neighborhood yards and houses were surprisingly robust in typical Halloween regalia, with ghosts and ghouls dominating as well as the ubiquitous pumpkins. (As an aside and complete non-sequitur, my wife and I were at a local fair two weeks ago that hosted a “largest pumpkin” contest. The winning entry weighed 2254 pounds. That’s more than one ton of a single pumpkin!)
Yet, despite the countless man hours invested in house and yard decorations there was a paucity of visible trick or treat door knockers. It was like the neighborhood was all dressed up but nobody cared. Many of the decorations are already being disassembled and stored away to take up space waiting for next year’s reassembly. Yet, no country, publicly, does Halloween more zealously than America. The largest jamboree takes place in NYC, involving two million people. The Village Halloween Parade shuts down most of Lower Manhattan as huge papier-mâché beasts and fearful pageant puppets strut their strange stuff.
So, it caused me to think back to my childhood and how differently our family celebrated Halloween 70 years ago in my small town of Trumbull Connecticut!
First though, a little Halloween history may be interesting. The tradition originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, 2000 years ago. People would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off ghosts. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III designated November 1 as a time to honor all saints. Soon, All Saints Day incorporated some of the traditions of Samhain. The evening before was known as All Hallows Eve, and later Halloween. The primary reason for Halloween was to honor religious martyrs, and thus the traditions of ghosts and ghouls. It is only over more than 1300 years that Halloween has evolved into a day of activities like trick-or-treating, carving jack-o-lanterns, festive gatherings, donning costumes and eating treats.
Returning to my childhood in1953 when I was 6 years old, the anticipation of Halloween trick or treating had been building for weeks. My eight year old brother, myself, and my four year old sister (with the help of our parents) hand made our pirate, and baseball, and Baby Jane full body costumes. I was the baseball guy. My dad was a Little League coach and I was called Mickey after Mickey Mantle!
There was a babysitter for my 2 year old sister (and my fourth sibling was still three years away from becoming the family’s fifth child). Every other child in the neighborhood had prepared for the evening with similar intensity and anticipation. And just after dark, parents and children embarked together on the second most anticipated day of the year (of course Christmas was even MORE special). We left our house with parents having flashlights in hand, and the kids grasping Trick or Treat bags. Other parents and kids would join or leave the group as we made the rounds on our three street journey consisting of Ochsner Place, Botsford Place and Bonneville Drive.
Parents would guide us to a house’s sidewalk and we would walk alone, in full costume to the front door and ring the bell. We would wait in anticipation and when the door opened we would shout “Trick or Treat!” and hold open our treat bag. Almost every house would welcome the kids and wave to the parents at the edge of their front walk and dump in the treats of the early 1950’s - Wax Lips, Zagnuts, BB Bats, Wax Bottles, Sky Bars, Candy Cigarettes, Kits Taffy, Jawbreakers, Mary Janes, Sugar Daddy and more. Sometimes they would deposit a quarter as well. Some houses had no lights on as a sure sign that they were not trick or treat friendly. There were certainly no thoughts about ANY negative consequences of being out in the neighborhood, and most parents happily anticipated such an exciting adventure with their kids.
The highlight of the evening was getting back home and dumping out your full candy bags on the kitchen table containing enough sugar to keep us revved up for a couple of weeks. The kids bonded, the parents bonded and the neighborhood bonded over the mutual experience of Halloween evening.
I also remember the joy of duplicating that experience with my own children, in the Brooklawn neighborhood of Fairfield CT. Of course, the candy selection had morphed into M&Ms, Mars, MilkyWay, and licorice (please red, not black). It always seemed like Halloween always arrived on the warmest and most beautiful evening of the fall...
Today I have six amazingly beautiful grandchildren. Their Halloween experience this past week may have been just as fun for them as mine was for me and for my children at their same age. My experience as a kid 70 years ago was the result of a tradition passed down to my parents in the early 1950’s as a door to door neighborhood “trick or treat” tradition. Seven decades later, with instant communication able to organize home or school events, busy two working parent families, and few streets crowded with traffic.
It seems now that Halloween is evolving from knocking on neighborhood doors into Halloween events, like school or home parties, or local fairs and farmer’s markets. As I said in a much earlier published Father’s Blog… in the 1950’s we still had to make operator assisted LOCAL telephone calls! No wonder we wanted to knock on neighbor’s doors and share the excitement of Halloween!
My personal memory of Halloween was such a fun and bonded family evening it may simply be nostalgia calling. I greatly love the relationship I have with my children and greatly admire the relationship they have with their children. And I really appreciate that they are now building traditions of their own.