Thread: earliest halloween memories

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I was at a book store today that carries older books some of them out of print, and was pleasantly reminded of a favorite childhood book called, Popcorn a Frank Asch Bear Story.


I remember always reading this at the dentist and no matter what time of year, I wished it could be the magical night called halloween! Since I'm feeling all nostalgic now, I thought it would be fun it we all shared our fondest or earliest halloween memory! The enthusiasm I felt looking forward to halloween as a child has stayed with me all these years and I still remember being four and telling my older sister as we walked home under the light of a full yellow moon, pillow cases filled with our time spent roaming the dark, that we should never be too old to trick or treat. And I have never faltered to find merriment in halloween! Hence my user name!

Lets share our memories that reconnect us to the halloween spirit!

By the by, the book I mentioned is an awsome read about the mayhem that ensues when a bear throws a halloween party!

OMG-I read this book all the time to my boys when they were little (their 20 & 24 now)-I would love to get a copy of that book again and give one to each one of them! Earliest memory-going trick or treating in the snow (in MI). Other years just the whole amtophsere of the evening-windy, leaves blowing up and down the streets, a harvest moon, tons of candy-staying up late and sorting it all out or trading with my brother and sisters, throwing up all night cuz I ate too much candy (not a good memory) and telling ghost stories with my family! Great memories!!

Sadly, I can't remember too much about my childhood. Only bits and pieces (it was pretty rough.) My father was (and still is) an a$$. I specifically remember a Halloween when I was either 6 or 7. I had gotten my costume on and was all ready to go TOTing. I was so happy, running around telling everyone to hurry up. Well, my father decided that he wanted to go to a bar and my mom had to go with him. We weren't allowed to go TOTing!!! I was devastated! I'll never, ever forget that! If your children are still young, shouldn't you think about them FIRST on Halloween?? We lived on a farm out in the boonies so we couldn't just walk anywhere and we didn't have any relatives close by. A friend had already left for TOTing before I found out what was going on so we couldn't go with them. That was my personal Halloween horror story! Oh, my father got drunk out of his mind and my mom left him passed out in the truck.

Wow! Thanks for posting that book.... it was my favorite book to check out at my elementary school library. Halloween for me was always so much fun. My fondest halloween memory is trick or treating with my brother and my parents, and we had soo much candy we were dragging it in giant white pillow cases. Finally the load became so heavy that my dad had to go back home to get our red wagon so we could wheel all of our goodies.

It saddens me that today our neighborhood is dead on Halloween. It seems as if all of the children have grown up, because our house only gets 1 - 2 doorbell rings a year. I hope trick or treating doesn't die out due to paranoia or truck-or-treating. It'd be such a shame if my future children couldn't live out the great joys and excitement of Halloween night.

My earliest memory of actual Halloween night is trick or treating at age five... I remember this particular house being off limits because hippies lived there. lol And it was a conservative neighborhood, and everyone said they'd "put dope in the candy" - and there was another house where a man who was normally an ass just got SO cool for Halloween, and he'd look at each group of ToTers and give the best costume a big bag of potato chips. I was bummed I didn't win.

But Kenny, who did win, was a little hobo and he looked great, so it's okay.

Wow...My earliest Halloween memory...I was probably 5, and my mother walked me to my older sister's school to watch the Halloween Parade and have a cupcake at the school's party. I was dressed in a horizontal-striped convict outfit with a skull mask, and carried a plastic blown skull on a black stick. That would have been in 1962 - I still have that blown plastic skull in my studio!

I was 5, I had one of those flimsy skeleton costumes, black fabric with a skeleton sort of painted on it, then put on the skeleton mask, walk around in the dark and look "boney"!
I remember being somewhat fascinated by the potential illusion of this design.
My Mother took my picture in this costume, I felt so slick!
Maybe she was in a hurry or I just couldn't be bothered to put any shoes on so I was a barefoot skeleton in the photograph, which in classical paintings when someone is shown barefoot means they are really dead (since the living always needed shoes and the dead really did not.)
I have used this old picture in my advertising for my haunted house, The Ravens Grin Inn.
I am quite the Halloween junkie, putting in a great many hours every week working on and in this house and being open for tours almost every night of the entire year, going on 20 years now! My happy Halloween memories get redefined almost every night of the year !
Many people coming here see, hear and feel the fun I am having entertaining them and it excites and makes them happy(usually).
I have heard the comment many times over the years:"And We paid You to come here!?"
Since I am doing so much laughing at their getting scared or startled, but I think I am doing it "right", I always need to hear them laugh after I make them scream and jump, so I know everyone is still having fun, not becoming phobic or something.

There were (at least) 12 religions and as many political philosophies in my family. We were natural born story tellers and loved to get our grand parents who lived with us on the farm to tell us ghost stories whenever we could. Halloween was brought over by our Scottish ancestors in 1835 and we celebrated it big time every year.
For this reason, a lot of my memories were me joining the fun IN PROGRESS...my first halloween mask I remember owning was a plastic job that was supposed to be a pirate but looked way to scary to stay just that...the first halloween mask I remember EVER was my Gramma's..it was a skull painted on startched cotton fabric, probably from the 30's or 40's with a string on the back. The first and best Halloween story was THE BOTTLE IMP..which my Gramp changed to THE MILK BOTTLE STORY..central theme; the owner of a magical 'milk bottle' got three wishes, and ONLY three wishes, and then had to SELL the bottle for LESS then he paid for it OR DIE..and the one guy who gets the bottle gets rid of it and then HAS to buy it BACK to cure his cancer and by THEN it's going for like 3 cents, and he can't find ANYONE who wants to buy it and the noose is getting tighter and tighter...or Gramma telling me about the two men sitting outside in front of the crumbly wall and the gnarled tree and the one telling the other he can't go home because of ghosts driving him away from his home, and the other guy saying how he lost his gal and his best friend after DR. CALIGARI came to town..for some reason, CFRB (Toronto) used to play old radio shows on the weekends and I got to hear a lot of Halloween stuff during the weekends in October...WAR OF THE WORLDS was amazing...saw a LOT of the Nostradamus commercials on t.v. for the drive in movie series, but did NOT see any of the Nostradamus movies themselves..("too scary for boys and girls!" my folks said!) and the Universal monster movies were still playing on afternoon tv with the Hammer movies...and WHO can forget the Aurora model boxes???

Wow, it's nice hearing everyone's memories! Keep em coming!

Snickers, that's awsome that you used pillow cases too! Anytime someone sees our halloween photos from trick or treating years they always comment on how abnormal that was but I say its inventive ! Plus we had candy all year, don't think my parents had to buy it much either cause we were set from our halloween spoils!

It does bring pangs to my heart to hear others unhappy memories during the wonderment and bewitching halloween evening but now you're at this forum so you're well off now aren't you!

My earliest memory was my sister and me carving a pumpkin with my mom. I must have been about 4 or 5 at the time. But we would always put a vanilla smelling candle in the pumpkin and that smell has stuck with me through the years. Anytime I smell vanilla candles, it reminds me of halloween.

When I was a bit older and my brother had been born, we used to make a tent out of sheets and lay in there in the dark with a flash light and read Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark I loved that book!!