Homemade Halloween costumes. Visits to Haunted Houses. Creatively carved pumpkins. Sticky orange colored popcorn balls. And buckets of candy. Yes! Buckets of candy!
These are a few of my memories from Halloween’s past. A time when we would gather at my aunt’s house to celebrate the holiday (as well as her birthday). A time when we would race from house to house gathering as much candy as our buckets could hold. When they were filled, we would run back to the house to dump them, then head back outside for more. The Dads would accompany us, chatting away while keeping us cousins corralled, occasionally helping us retrieve candy buckets that had spilled after tripping over a crack in the sidewalk. We thanked them for their hard work with a stylish necktie – one neighbor’s alternative to giving candy to us trick-or-treaters.
Back at the house, we would dump all our candy out onto the floor, group all the similar candies together, count our loot and begin eating. I don’t really remember my parents curtailing my candy consumption, they just let me relish in the wonder of the night.
These wonderful Halloween night traditions were the culmination of a season of enjoyment. In addition to the standard store-bought Halloween decorations, we would stuff some of Dad’s clothes with newspaper to make a scarecrow, tie up cornhusks on the front posts, and head out to a roadside stand to pick out the perfect pumpkin. We waited patiently while Mom crafted bunnies, witches, robots, Little Red Riding Hood, angels and sailor costumes — whatever we had desired to wear that year.
Pumpkin muffins, ghost-shaped cookies, caramel apples and homemade popcorn balls were on hand for our enjoyment. We made pumpkin carving a family affair, with each of us sketching out several designs on paper before grabbing our knives to start carving. It was a low tech, high enjoyment way to enjoy the season.
The Changing Face of Halloween
Halloween’s origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain when the Celts marked the end of the harvest and beginning of the dark winter ahead on November 1st. The Celts believed that during the night before the new year arrived the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On that evening the ghosts of the dead returned to earth to cause trouble.
As a way to ensure they didn’t encounter ghosts when they left their homes, Celts would wear masks so that they wouldn’t be recognized, hoping the ghosts would mistake them for fellow spirits. To keep them away from their homes, people would place bowls of food outside their homes to appease the ghosts and prevent them from entering.
