Lost Traditions of Halloween - by Jo-Ann Roberts

 

Last Sunday, my husband and I filled 160 Halloween bags with Hershey Miniatures, Fun Size Almond Joys, Snickers, and Twix bars, along with Dum-Dum pops. As we worked, we reminisced about our own Halloween traditions...

To understand why Halloween in the 1960s felt the way it did, you have to understand that the last of the baby boomers had been born...roughly 76 million of them. Kids were everywhere. In some neighborhoods there would be 30 or 40 children within a two-block area. Families often had five or six kids, and that meant that Halloween was not a small event. It was an invasion. Houses answered the door hundreds of times in a single night. Surrendering, some homeowners gave up the doorbell and set up a card table on the front porch. (Ironically, because we have so many trick-or-treaters, this is now what we do!)

On October 31,1962, the number one song in American was about a monster throwing a dance party in his laboratory. That night, millions of kids walked out their front doors after dark with no parents, no phones, and a pillowcase. 

Nobody in 1962 bought a special bag for trick-or-treating. You went to your room, pulled the case off the pillow and that was your bag for the night. Older siblings pointed out that the pillowcase was light enough to carry empty and strong enough to swing over your shoulder when full. By 8:00, that pillowcase had real heft and the ghosts and goblins came home dragging the sack across the sidewalk because their arms had given out.

In 1962, you could walk into any classroom or kitchen to find a grinning black cat with an arched back, a witch on a broomstick, or a jointed cardboard skeleton, its arms and legs held together with little brass fasteners so you could pose it any way you wanted. They were embossed, die-cut, and printed in that specific palette of pumpkin orange, midnight black, and sickly yellow that still says Halloween to anyone who grew up with it. Families bought them once and used the for twenty years. A single cutout cost about ten cents, and a full skeleton might run a quarter at the five and dime. Parents taped them to the front door and every year a little more of the corners tore away. They went back into the same shoebox in the hall closet and came out the next fall looking a little more tired and a little more loved.

In elementary schools in 1962, the afternoon of October 31st belonged to the

costume parade. You brought your costume to school in a paper grocery bag, tucked beneath your coat in the cloakroom, and the whole morning dragged by. No one learned anything. After lunch, the class filed into the cloakroom to change, and suddenly your classroom was full of witches, hobos, pirates, ballerinas, and at least four ghosts. Then came the parade. Every class lined up and marched through the halls, around the playground, and sometimes down the sidewalk so parents could watch from the curb. The afternoon ended with a party, complete with cupcakes with orange frosting topped with candy corn, orange Kool-Aid, and paper napkins printed with black cats.

More homemade treats awaited us later in the evening. In 1962, getting homemade food on Halloween was completely normal. Brownies wrapped in waxed paper, chocolate chip cookies in sandwich bags, fudge, and Rice Krispie treats. One neighbor down the street was known for her sugar cookies shaped like pumpkins, and we went to her house first. 

Along with the homemade treats, was the Candy Dump when you got home. Children dumped their loot on the kitchen table. Parents would survey the pile and pulled out any unwrapped candy, broken popcorn balls, and sticky candy apples, leaving the penny candy. Wax lips, bright red, which you wore for thirty seconds and then chewed like flavorless gum. Wax bottles filled with a few drops of colored syrup that you bit the top off and drank. Candy cigarettes, which sticks with a red tip sold in little boxes that looked exactly like the real thing. Necco wafers, Mary Janes, Bit-o-Honey, sugar daddy suckers, candy necklaces, candy buttons stuck to strips of paper where you as much paper as candy, and of course, candy corn. Kids ranked the candy instantly. Chocolate was gold. Penny candy was currency, and the dreaded peanut butter taffy in the orange and black wax paper went straight into the discard pile for dad.

Then, if you had siblings, came the trading. A full-size Hershey bar was worth three Tootsie Rolls. A Milky Way was worth a Baby Ruth. Then your father would wander into the kitchen, look over the piles, and casually take a Hershey bar for himself, explaining that this was his fee for walking you around the neighborhood, even if he had not walked you anywhere.

Today, most costumes come in plastic bags from the big box stores. They look great in photos but any child who wore a homemade costume in 1962 could tell you exactly what their mother's costume looked like right down to the safety pine in the back. Pattern companies like Simplicity and McCall's sold paper sewing patterns for Halloween costumes. Clowns with ruffled collars, pumpkins stuffed with newspaper, witches with pointed hats rolled from black construction paper, robots made from cardboard boxes, dryer vent hose, and whole roll of aluminum foil. These costumes were never perfect, but they were made with love so you could be special for one night.

Today, some neighborhoods still light up, and they are wonderful reminders of lost traditions. Halloween was never about the candy, costumes, or parties. It was about the costumes your mother made, your dad carving a pumpkin on the kitchen table. These weren't just traditions. they were proof that a whole neighborhood once raised its kids together, one porch light at a time.