Thread: Your best Halloween memories

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What are you best Halloween memories? The ones you think about year after year and that keep you going on your displays?

One of my best memories was last year. Just moved to Idaho and I wasn’t sure what the Tot numbers were like out here. I decided to make a good impression and go all out. Gravestones, giant man eating pumpkins, dead pirates, a grim reaper hidden in the shadows. Guillotine that you had to walk under to reach the door.

First tot arrived early. Two babies in a stroller. Their parents loved the display and I was encouraged that people were already coming. In the next five hours I had one tot. just one more. Finally around nine I was ready to pull in the big stuff and turn off the lights. When three kids, two boys and a girl, they must have been around seven years old wonder up.

After they get their candy they ask if they can walk in the graveyard to look at the props. I say sure. they start running around calling to each other to come check out this prop or that one. It was great. They noticed all the little things like the finger in the pumpkins mouth, the aged tombstones. Asking where I bought the props. Their faces lit up when I said I made them. They kept asking how I did this or made that. As they were leaving they stopped and asked if I was going to decorate again next (this) year.

Their joy was worth a year’s preparations.

My best Halloween memories were running around the neighborhood with my siblings and friends after trick-or-treating. Our parents would all be outside drinking hot buttered rum, we'd trade candy and play tag, and everyone was always so happy!

I don't have anything specific I just remember loving trick or treating. I loved walking through areas of my neighborhood I rarely went, the costumes, the cool weather, and the smell of all the candy in a plastic pumpkin/jack o lantern.

I remember:

- Wondering how my Dad could eat that acursed candy corn!
- That unique smell of sweat and vinyl you smelled after going to just a couple of houses and you started sweating in your mask.
- Trying to find a way to keep your mask on when that little stupid silver metal clip that held the elastic string broke off or tore through the mask.
- Wondering how long you could keep your costume going after Halloween, and feeling sick when the fabric started tearing before you even got back to the house after trick or treating.
- Going to Woolworth's, Kresge's (now K-Mart), Grant's, or Murphy's five and dime stores to shop for costumes.
- Looking through dozens of those Collegetown Costume, Ben Cooper, and Spooktown boxes and seeing the masks through the pumpkin-shaped hole in the front.
- Smelling that fantastic scent of burnt pumpkins at every house... back when people used candles instead of flicker lights.
- Seeing that infamous 4-5ft tall paper skeleton posted on almost everyone's front door or living room window, bent into every shape imaginable.
- Coming home with pillowcases full of candy, negotiating trades with my sisters like we were the Teamsters, and watching It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown on KDKA Channel 2 at 8:00.

I have a lot of great memories. Among all of these, I recall the thrill of approaching a dark house that had a jack o'lantern lit and flickering on the porch, or several of them... I always liked the way JOLs look in the dark!