Here in the South, fall and winter always lag behind my Midwestern-bred internal calendar. On the next-to-last day of September, it was sunny and 71 degrees, with the leaves still clinging to the trees and few of them showing even a trace of color. Yet folks are already setting out plastic pumpkins and pint-sized ghosts for Halloween. Why not wait a bit longer, until we get some cool, clear evenings, big yellow moons, fresh apple cider, and piles of fallen leaves to kick through on the way home from school?
Like everything else, this holiday is different than it used to be, not least because the adults have taken over what their children used to rule. I can’t even believe some of the costumes that people expect sane women to put on, like this one. Hi there, sailor. New in town?
When I was a kid, all you needed was an old sheet and you’d be a perfectly passable ghost for trick or treat. Naturally, the look wasn’t as important as the loot, every type of candy you could imagine and enough of it to power a Saturn V. We’d roam the streets for blocks around in little packs with (gasp, shock!) no adult escorts. Our parents didn’t see any danger, and in all my years of trick or treating, there was none.
Of course, we were never the types that had serious mischief in mind, either. The only hijinks I remember came in an election year, when we stopped at the one house in the neighborhood with a Goldwater sign and – after collecting our goodies – yelled out in unison, “Vote for Johnson in 64! We’ll hang Goldwater at your front door!” Oh, those kids, I tell ya…
The last time I wore a Halloween costume was fourteen or fifteen years ago, when I went to a party as Dilbert (please, no wisecracks about type-casting). It was easy to make: an old white shirt, some fake glasses, a couple of pens in the pocket, and a tie rigged up with a bent coat hangar so it stuck out in front of my chest, like the real thing. I might’ve found a commercial, ready-made one. But what fun is that?
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