Halloween Memories

I may have posted something similar before but this time of year always evokes fond childhood memories for me. The only costume I remember wearing is a mouse costume. It was red and made out of the windbreaker-type of material. It had a black plastic tail coming out of the back, a hood that came up over my head and a gray, plastic mouse face mask. I thought it was great. The only thing I didn't like about it was the fact that my face would get all wet behind the mask from my warm breath mixing with the coldness of the mask. Yuck!!!

We always carried brown paper grocery bags to carry our treats in. None of these cutesy bags or carriers that they have now. Huh-uh.

I loved most every kind of candy, with the exception of sour or hot stuff. No fireballs or sweettarts for me, please. So, I usually traded those for something else. You see, after we returned home, Mom and Dad would help us get cleaned up and ready for bed. Then we...the five of us kids.....would sit down in the middle of the living room floor, dump our candy out and begin sorting through it, swapping eachother for our favorites and, of course, passing off the really undesirables to Mom and Dad, like apples, crackers, pennies, and the like.

Myself, if I am going to eat candy, I prefer for it to be chocolate or caramel and nuts are an added bonus! Some of my favorites were Sugar Daddies or Sugar Babies, most candy bars, and taffy.

I remember one Halloween, this little old lady had just made a batch of fudge. She told us to hold our hands out....we didn't know what was coming.....and she slapped a piece of this soft fudge in the palm of our hand. Yuck! Of course, we ate it because we didn't have any other choice. There were others houses to get to and more candy to collect!! Needless to say, we didn't offer our open palms for any more handouts.

Daniel was pretty ambivalent about trick-or-treating until one Sunday afternoon when we lived in Logan. He had a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt and a Mickey Mouse mask. They weren't bought with the intention of going trick-or-treating nor were they bought at the same time. Anywayyy...this particular Sunday afternoon, one of our neighbors had told us to be sure and bring Daniel over for candy, so we dressed him up in bright blue sweatpants, his Mickey Mouse sweatshirt and we took the mask along. We took him next door, slipped the mask on his face, told him to knock on the door....he liked THAT! *smile*......and say "Trick or Treat". Well, when he saw that by doing so he could get FREE candy, he was hooked!!! *smile* We took him most every after that till he was about 10, though sometimes not because trick-or-treat here is done on Sunday afternoons and sometimes it just didn't work out with our church schedule.


Now, you talk about being a discriminatory candy eater, that is Daniel. Most years, I would end up throwing out most of the candy he had gotten or giving it away or taking it into work or to church for the SS classes. But he loved going out and getting it!! *smile* And we made some wonderful memories in the process.

The next two or three years, he was a clown. I made his costume from old material and yarn I had here at home and I had clown make-up from when I dressed up as a clown for Sunday School promotions and so on. Then he decided to be a pirate and I put his costume together with things here at home and added a couple of items that I bought. His last two or three years, he decided to be a karate/ninja guy and I made that costume, too.

Daniel always knew what he wanted to be like a year in advance and then he would want to be that particular character for two or three years, so it was easy to make him happy.