Haunted Houses

Despite Superstorm Sandy’s best efforts last week, we made it through Halloween. We had a slightly higher number of kids this year than last year, but still not that many. We didn’t even finish off two bags of candy, despite more kids. We saw some really cute kids, their little faces happy and smiling as they loaded up their bags with Kit Kats and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. One little girl took a Peanut Butter Cup, looked at it and said “Ooh, what’s in this?” To which her mother replied “Don’t worry. If you don’t like it, Mommy will eat it.” Just a hunch, but from the way she was clutching that piece of candy I don’t think Mommy was going to get it, no matter what.

While watching the news over the weekend to get an update on the storm, I saw an interview with a person that does a haunted house every year for Halloween. Due to the storm they were going to have to cancel it this year. Somehow that story sparked a memory for me. It had nothing to do with Halloween, but it did include a haunted house. Sort of.

I don’t remember what time of year it was, but it was during the school year because everyone but my younger brother and I were at school. We were in the backyard playing before lunch with the sun shining brightly, warm enough that we didn’t need a jacket that day. There was a small hill at the back of my yard that led up to another street and a wooded area. At the top of the hill there was a small building, which I had only seen from down below, and which my older brothers had told me had been a chicken coop but had nothing in it now. They had also told me that the house beyond the old chicken coop was haunted, so I shouldn’t go near it. How they knew this I didn’t know, but at that age I thought they knew everything and I believed everything they said.  

My younger brother and I must have gotten bored playing with our Matchbox cars and Tonka trucks because we decided to go up the hill a bit. The hill was sandy and there were lots of rocks of varying sizes mixed in. We threw rocks down the hill for a while and we pretended they were bombs hitting the ground and blowing our enemies to bits. At some point we went to the top of the hill. We moved toward the chicken coop and I picked up a couple of good size rocks to protect us in case the house really was haunted. The old chicken coop looked abandoned and there were already a couple of windows broken. I remember throwing a rock at one of the windows and it broke with a marvelous tinkling sound, like it was tickling my ears.

We took turns throwing our rocks at the windows, missing some and hitting others, laughing the whole time. We were pretty good shots for two little kids and were having the time of our lives. We had just picked up another round of ammo when a loud voice rang out from the direction of the house, telling us to stop. We both slowly turned toward the voice – if it was a ghost we didn’t want to see him. To our surprise, it was just an older man. To our horror, he was starting to come down the stairs to the yard and toward us.

We turned and started to run for the hill, no words necessary between us, and my heart beating in my throat. I figured he’d stop at the edge of his yard, but when I glanced back I was shocked to see that he was coming after us. We ran down the hill and tore across the back yard toward the door and safety. We ran inside and sat down at the dining room table, ready for lunch. Mom was in the kitchen and turned around when we came flying into the room, probably because the door slammed. Or maybe because we were both out of breath.

I’m sure my Mom was wondering what the heck was going on with the two of us, especially when the older man just walked right into the house. He was not a happy camper and told Mom we had broken some windows. When she asked us if we had, a brilliant explanation came to me and I told her it wasn’t us, it was two kids who looked like us. Needless to say, Mom didn’t believe us. She was pretty angry and I think she even threatened to tie us to a tree so we couldn’t get out of the yard. I should have learned at that point not to believe everything my older brothers told me, but unfortunately, it took me a few more years to learn that lesson. 

So there was no haunted house that day and there was no haunted house this year for some people, nothing to give them their Halloween chills. Maybe next time I’ll talk about politics – now that would be scary.

It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like...Halloween?

There are some people that decorate their house for everything these days. Decorating for Halloween seems to be getting as big as Christmas. People have lights in their house and outside of their house, they have lawn and tree decorations, and they put them up at the beginning of October. It even looks like people are starting to try to outdo their neighbor, just like they do at Christmas.

There’s a house near me that has candles with orange lights in every window and orange lights in their trees. They also have cob webs, spider webs and bats in their trees, and there are about 10 pumpkins in their yard. Another house I go past on my way to work has lights in the windows and trees, and four interlocking ghosts around the base of a tree, looking like they’re praying to it. A third house has skeletons hanging by their necks and a cardboard cutout tombstone in the front yard. That’s a lot of stuff and it’s all store bought.

I remember the “good old days”, when Halloween was for the kids and mostly by the kids. In my house we used to make our own decorations, some at school and some at home. We would draw and/or color our own jack-o-lanterns, ghosts, bats, skeletons, witches, and other assorted monsters, and hang them up in the front windows. My Dad brought home these huge rolls of paper so we had plenty of it to work on. The paper wasn’t too thick, so we could also trace pictures out of coloring books or magazines and then color them in. We did our best work and then we’d tape them to the front windows. We’d even go outside and admire our work so we could see how awesome it looked from other people’s points of view.

It wasn’t just my family either. Every house with kids had homemade decorations hanging in the windows. As I went around the neighborhood on Halloween night, filling my bag with chocolaty goodness, I checked out the art work, too. I compared and critiqued, and I usually thought ours were the best, but there were a few here and there that were just as good. Not better, but just as good. After all, I thought that we were quite the artistes.

Personally, I think these homemade decorations were way better than what people buy today. Not because they were higher quality, but because the kids did them. Instead of the parents spending hundreds of dollars buying decorations, the kids spent hundreds of minutes making their own decorations. It didn’t matter if you were a great artist or not, most of us weren’t, myself included. The pictures and drawings we put in our windows were ours and we were proud of them.

Another thing about Halloween in the “good old days”: we weren’t trying to scare the snot out of everybody. There were no realistic looking severed limbs or decapitations and there was very little blood and gore. Sure, there were ghosts and Frankensteins, but that’s about as far as it went. I see stuff today that I wouldn’t have wanted to see when I was a kid and wouldn’t have wanted my kids to see when they were little. When I was younger, it was all about the fun and the candy, not the lights and paraphernalia, and certainly not the scare factor. Since Halloween is really for the kids, isn’t that the way it should be?

Trick or Treat

Halloween is just not as fun as it used to be. There was a time when my wife and I were the young couple in the neighborhood and our kids were the little ones. We’d take them around the neighborhood and everyone would say how cute they were – my son in his Sponge Bob, Woody and Vampire (way before Twilight ushered in the vampire phenomena) costumes, and my daughter in her Pocahontas, Dorothy and Minnie Mouse costumes. Now we’re the “old” couple with the older kids and we marvel at how cute all the little kids are. It’s kind of sad, one kid in college and another in high school and we’re relegated to the over-the-hill gang.

In the neighborhood we live in now, all the kids grew up at once. We used to have tons of kids walking around the streets and coming to our house, now we get about 15 or 20 kids. And half of them aren’t even from our neighborhood. But the little kids are still so cute! Especially when the kids do what kids do and not what the parents want them to do. One mother was trying to do the polite thing and get her little girl to say thank you. “Do you have something to say?” asked the mother. After no response, the mother asked again, “Don’t you want to say something?” The girl, starting to walk away, turned around and gave one of those irresistibly cute little kid smiles and said, “See you later!” Totally innocent and totally cute.

We had a great neighborhood for trick-or-treating when I was growing up. Nobody had a huge yard so the houses were kind of tightly packed together, which was great when we were little because we could do both sides of half the street in a relatively short amount of time and have enough candy to last for weeks. Well, that is, if we could have kept all our candy. When we got home we were allowed to keep some of the candy and the rest went into a big bowl that Mom was in charge of. I don’t remember how much we could keep for ourselves, but it was somewhere between not enough and too little. Nevertheless, we’d choose what we wanted for our private stash and Mom would either approve it or make us put more into the community bowl. You would have thought we were hoarding gold instead of Snickers, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and M&M’s. I always knew exactly how many of each type I had, just in case someone tried to steal one of my prizes. I don’t think that ever happened, but I just didn’t trust my older brothers. Sorry guys. 

When we got older and were able to go out on our own, we did our street and the next street over. Whoa baby, did we get a lot of candy! We got a little smarter as we got older, too. We ate some of the best stuff before we went home and had to give up most of the good stuff. We even got creative a couple of years and would go around once, mix and match our costumes, and go around again. Of course, most of the neighbors knew what we were doing and would give us the “Haven’t I already seen you tonight?” speech and not give us more. Back then, everybody knew everybody in the neighborhood, so even with costumes they knew who we were. However, there were a few neighbors who gave us more anyway and we added to our loot.

I vaguely remember what our costumes were like back then. I remember wearing a Casper the Ghost costume for a couple of years, which was a cheap pullover with one of those plastic masks that made your face sweat even if it was 30 degrees that night. I think I went out as a baseball player one year, which meant putting on my team jersey and hat and carrying my glove. Low cost or no cost costumes were the rule. I also remember going out as a girl when I was about 10 years old, borrowing my sister’s skirt, tights and shirt, and using the smaller end of L’eggs eggs for a chest. I wore a wig, too, but I have no idea where that came from. I never did that again because a couple of my friends were looking at me in an extremely creepy way all night. It kind of made my skin crawl.

Back in the present, the trick-or-treaters stopped coming fairly early and we were left with half of the candy we bought, even after we were giving out multiples to everybody and me and my son had a couple of pieces ourselves. The fun was over before it began. Sure, there were a couple of cute kids that came by, but there was just something missing. A terribly scary thought has just crossed my mind and I can’t believe I’m even thinking about it, but maybe when we have grandkids Halloween will be fun again. Until then I’ll just have to reminisce about how incredibly cute my own kids were on Halloween. Even as I marvel at how they've grown into pretty incredible young adults.