You miss those school Halloween parties, where you didn’t have do any work and you watched some Disney Halloween movie. Eating pizza in class, and stuffing your face with candy until you wanted to barf. When your school had a Halloween parade, and your parent’s came to watch and take photos of you in your home-made costume/costume. Running home from school in your costume, and you didn’t have to worry about doing homework that night. Shoving your dinner down your throat, just so you could make it outside before it got dark. Using a pillowcase or pumpkin tin to get all your candy. Trick or treating every single house, even the one’s without the lights on…Cause you knew they where still in there. Getting crappy candy, pennies, apples, or raisins…And shoving them down to the bottom of your bag, just so you wouldn’t have to see it until months later. Getting home hours later, only to have your parent’s monitor your candy OR HIDE IT FROM YOU so you wouldn’t go into a sugar coma. And before bed you snuck down stairs to catch the last twenty minutes of Halloween or Nightmare on Elm’s street, and scaring the shit out of yourself until you slumped to bed still in your costume.
And those Unicef boxes. I’m all for charity and supporting under-nourished kids in third-world countries these days, but back then? Come on. That just didn’t compute. Rare were the houses that gave you full sized Snicker bars - but they were there and you’d figure out a way to go back two, maybe three times in a night.
Of course, then we became teenagers and the joys of trick or treating were replaced with hiding in bushes while older kids shot pellet guns at us, and we were more interested in shaving cream fights, egging cars, and TP’ing houses. The really bad kids? They had paint ball guns and put slices of bologna on people’s cars (takes the paint right off).
My weirdest memory? Walking down my street when I was about 12. A hearse, yes, a hearse drove by, rolled down its window, and doused me with some kind of water cannon. I was in awe.
