Trick or treat

In my old neighborhood, we approached Halloween with the planning and precision of the D-Day invasion.

This was the old days, when you could get out and walk the streets of your neighborhood without your parents, because you most of the houses were owned by the parents of the kids you went to school with, and the occasional house that had old people with no kids in them either had a kindly old couple that gave out the best treats or else a spooky old man of whom we made up the most blood-curdling stories.

 As we got older and our parents let us roam further, we’d plot a course that often had us hitting multiple neighborhoods within the time-frame we were allowed to be out, and even involved cutting through the woods and across creeks to get to the “good” houses, the ones that had the reputation for just leaving candy out in baskets on the front porch in the belief that the honor system would work with a bunch of kids wearing masks.

 Masks – that was about the extent of our store-bought Halloween costumes. You could get a mask of Superman or Batman or a skeleton or a cat. Some were supposed to be scary; some were supposed to be funny; some were cute. Usually, the masks were so hot (this was October in the Deep South, where the temperature could still be in the 70s at night) and the eye-holes so misaligned you had to push the mask up on the top of your head between houses, adding additional strain to that piece of elastic that went around behind your head to keep the mask tight; a piece of elastic that invariably broke after about the hundredth push to the top of the head-pull back into place, and then you were forced to either hold the mask in place with one hand or tie the ends of the elastic around your ears in an effort to keep the illusion of identity in place.

 Beyond the mask, it was up to us or our moms to fill out the rest of the costume. Ghosts were easy, of course – you just got an old white sheet and draped it over your head so that it hung loosely down around your ankles. It could be held in place by the appropriate “Casper” mask, but boy was that hot – a sheet over your head, clamped in place by this mask-and-elastic contraption wrapped around your head. Some moms made costumes – red and blue Superman pajamas with a red towel cape, or a vest and holster if you were a cowboy, or even sticking cotton balls all over a white sweatshirt to try to resemble a sheep.

 If you played on a sports team maybe you just wore your football or baseball uniform or, if you were a girl, your cheerleading outfit but changed up the logo to a professional or college team. Part of the tradition was that when the parents answered the door, they’d exclaim “Oh, look! Superman and Casper and a Georgia Bulldog!” and act like they didn’t know who you were.

 I once decided I would go out dressed up as a “hood” – that’s what we called tough guys back then – and so wore what I thought was a convincing get-up of jeans, boots, a leather jacket, and white t-shirt. Much to my chagrin, we’d get to a house and the mom would answer the door and say, “Oh, look! Superman and Casper and a baseball player and – oh, Ray, you decided not to wear a costume this year?”

 But they still gave me the candy, which was all that mattered.

 When you got home, you emptied the sack to look at this amassed treasure, eat a few pieces, then decide to save the rest for later. The next day you compared notes on which houses gave the best candy and which ones gave out the dreaded apples and bananas (you avoided those houses the next year), and what houses you wanted to make sure you got to early the next year.

 Sometimes you hid your Halloween candy so well you forgot where it was; sometimes you would find your candy gone and your dad would swear he didn’t eat it even though you found candy wrappers in his bedroom waste basket. 

Somewhere along the way, Halloween became a holiday for single adults. Costumes got more elaborate or more risqué (otherwise prime and proper schoolteachers would dress up like hookers or sexy witches or nurses). I remember one year, after college, going to a local club on Halloween and there was this guy who was wearing a ring over his head like a halo, but he had a shower curtain hanging from it and a shower nozzle somehow strapped to the ring that actually could spray water. He was wearing a bathing suit and kept inviting these sexy witches/nurses/hookers to “take a shower with me.” 

There was no candy involved.

Then again ... 

 There were those people who told us that celebrating Halloween was an invitation for Satan to send his demons in to steal your soul. I don’t know about that. I only know a few of the kids I grew up with that I suspected of being demon-possessed, but I never made the correlation to their Casper the Friendly Ghost costume. 

Then came the time I forgot it was Halloween. I was sitting in the living room of the house I was renting with a couple other guys (this was right after college; the other guys may have been out chasing sexy witches for all I know) when the doorbell rang. I opened it, and there was a gaggle of boys, in costumes of some Japanese anime characters that I knew nothing about, who shouted the age-old greeting “Trick or treat!”

I had nothing. I was completely unprepared. I ran to the pantry and found a box of chocolate chip cookies. I came back and said, “Here, take this box of cookies. Don’t tell any other kids where you got it. I’m going to turn off the lights and pretend I’m not home.”

 Maybe that’s what they mean by “trick or treat.”