No Dogs Allowed

Halloween . . . there were some good ones and some not so good ones. The costumes were great, but were not always what I would call ethnically sensitive. So many years later, they are almost humorous if you have really poor taste and no decorum. At the time, nobody thought too much of it - at least nobody in our little white bread (white-trash would be more accurate), homogenized middle-America community.
They started out okay and got progressively worse. I can't imagine that my Mother ran out of characters to emulate, but my Mom was in charge when it came to sewing. She always had to push the limit - but that applied to everything. Not just costumes. My sister made such a cute Little Dutch Girl. Of course the costume was recycled when it didn't fit her any longer and I wore it while she graduated to Aunt Jemima. Seriously! Look.

Somehow I think I knew this was questionable - even then. We got other costumes that were equally questionable. My brother was Fu Man Chu one year. My sister dressed as a Geisha Girl.  Normalcy was a Raggedy Ann and a big fat pumpkin. These weren't so bad. I love that she painted my white baby shoes green. I wonder if these were the same pair my brother wore after I grew out of them.

I never understood why I had to dress up as something that we never came in contact with except to destroy (the pumpkin). Honestly, carving them was the slimiest task. I hated it. In years when we weren't diligent about bringing our Jack-O-Lanterns inside after dark the hoodlums that lived behind the fence would smash them across the front lawn and leave pumpkin shrapnel smeared everywhere before you could say, "Boo." Sometimes our artwork didn't even make it through Devil's Night. So disappointing!

One year my Dad tried to roast the pumpkin seeds. We collected the seeds, rinsed, soaked them in saltwater and toasted them for what seemed like hours.I think it worked, but eating them didn't bring the same holiday sentiment that it had before. It just wasn't the same. Somehow when you illuminate the mystery behind these childhood rituals, they're ruined forever. Pumpkins seeds taste better at Halloween. It's a fact.

One year we made popcorn balls. They weren't as good either. I'm pretty sure they ended up in a Teacher's Lounge somewhere. I swear, that place was like a black hole for left-overs.

The worst Halloween was the year that I couldn't go out. I got really sick a few weeks before Halloween - Tonsillitis. I missed school and the doctor told me that my prescription was to chew gum! I was so excited, but it really hurt. My entire jaw ached all the way to my ears. Once I was feeling better, surgery was scheduled. But I had to stay inside until after I came home from the hospital. Such a shame because I had the BEST costume! A beautiful, floaty, sparkly, yellow fairy costume complete with a wand and halo. And I couldn't go out and show it to anyone.

The best part about Halloween might have been the candy. Candy was never off-limits as a kid because my Dad had (has) a serious sweet tooth. It was the sheer volume that was so blatantly exorbitant. Then there was the matter of protecting it from a mysterious transportation to the black hole, aka Teacher's Lounge, for disposal under the premise that we had too much. It would rot our teeth. Did our Dad honestly think we didn't know that he worked in the same building as the black hole? My Dad was ever the one to give away possessions - even stuff that wasn't his - like our hard earned candy. As long as we got to sort it first, I don't think it mattered that much. We didn't really eat it, the quest that was what made Halloween so much fun. We went out with our wolf pack of neighbors and ran as fast as we could from one house to the next. No parents and all the candy we could get our hands on. A true raid of sorts. I don't think we wouldn't have cared what our Mother chose to dress up as so long as the end result was the same. But seriously, what would have been wrong with dressing up as a ghost or a dog?