A couple of years ago, some creative genius of a parent came up with a kid’s Halloween costume that looked like a COVID virus – garbage bag with foam spikey things protruding from it.
This year? Barbie. My, how times change.
In this part of the world, what kids wear when they go out trick-or-treating largely depends on weather. Costumes should be able to fit over snowmobile suits and preferably be waterproof. What it means is, anything with a black plastic cape works well – just add some fluorescent tape for safety. Makeup may be better than masks for safety reasons, but it runs when it gets wet. A pair of fake vampire teeth covers both safety and artistic requirements. So does a white sheet (or even better, a large square of white plastic), with very large eye holes.
Of course, the more pragmatic trick-or-treaters, especially those getting a little too big to be knocking on doors at Halloween, will simply don the top part of their hockey uniform and go for it. Candy is candy.
There was a time when trick-or-treaters would bring home such treats as homemade popcorn and a few store-bought toffees. The best treats were candy apples – crunchy fruit covered with crackling red candy or caramel, with chocolate chip cookies coming a close second. Worst? Printed material on the evils of Halloween.
These days, parents make sure they take a good look at their little trick-or-treaters’ haul of candy – in theory for safety reasons, although most kids suspect it has more to do with swiping the full-sized candy bars.
Sometimes modern kids play tricks in the best Halloween tradition, mostly involving garlands of toilet paper, and ringing doorbells and hiding to make it seem as if no one is there. Great fun.
Elderly relatives of those same children may remember a time people were more serious about the “trick” part of trick-or-treating – pushing over outhouses, preferably unoccupied; disassembling machinery and reassembling it somewhere awkward, like on a rooftop; or visiting the neighbourhood haunted house – there was one in every community – and scaring the living daylights out of fellow trick-or-treaters.
Although today’s children end up with a haul of candy that will keep them on a sugar buzz for weeks, there is something about Halloween that hearkens back to times when trick-or-treaters were young adults, going door-to-door looking for strong drink and cake. They wore costumes to trick the spirits that lurked in the underbrush, and carried candles in carved-out vegetables to light their way.
Halloween, even today, leads trick-or-treaters in their store-bought costumes, to venture near scary places – a gravel walkway where leaves crunch underfoot and naked branches make weird shadows in the moonlight, where an owl hooting in the darkness or the scratching of tiny feet in the bushes can raise the hair on one’s arms, and lead to frequent glances over one’s shoulder to see who – or what – might be following.
The pillowcase full of candy will be long forgotten, but a Halloween fright will be remembered and spoken of for years.
It may be decades since they were boys daring to walk near the cemetery on Halloween, but they still talk about whether they actually climbed the six-foot fence or whether they leaped over it at a full run.
There was the… thing… with glowing eyes that trailed them all the way home, staying almost out of sight but not quite. No way was it a raccoon or cat, not with those eyes.
And what about the man who answered the door to the deserted house? There have been debates on who dared whom to knock on the door… or perhaps it was some otherworldly compulsion. All they know is, somebody answered that door. And no one lived in the house. No one of this world, that is. It took a lot of hot soup and every light in the house turned on to calm them down – and one of them still gets weird about going down the basement at Halloween.
Happy haunting!
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Pauline Kerr is a Local Journalism Initiative currently working for Midwestern Newspapers. For question or comment, she can be reached at pkerr@midwesternnewspapers.com.
