My memories of Halloween as a child are mostly unhappy. I remember being bitterly cold in my costumes without an overcoat, or having trouble breathing through my plastic Spider-Man mask. The candy was nice, but getting it was too much of a pain in the ass. My best memory is the year that I went as a giant. I sat on my brother Andrew’s shoulders and he walked me around. I was warm, I didn’t have to walk forever, and I didn’t have any trouble breathing. Plus, I got to hang out with my big brother.
When I was in college, my best memory is when my girlfriend accompanied me to a party dressed as a Branch Davidian. That was appropriately ghoulish.
What was your favorite Halloween costume?
Borat from seven years ago. I met my wife in that costume.
Next year, when he’s able to walk, the kid will be wearing one of these.
Halloween is my favorite holiday. My favorite was probably my college freshmen costume, Keebler Elf:
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Next would be Republican Uncle Sam:
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And then this year I was Walter, but I don’t have my gun or my Foldger’s container:
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Also the Don’t Tread on Me wasn’t either of ours, it was his racist roommate’s.
“Don’t Tread on Me” is the new Swastika. Sad – the flag itself actually has a respectable history, as did the swastika.
Never was really into Halloween, even as a kid. I’m the kid that went trick-or-treating in their regular clothes.
I made a bit more effort than that — but not much.
Don’t like it at all.
6th grade, so I must have been 11-ish I went as a robot: big card board box with fake reel-to-reel tapes, a red flashlight rigged up so I could ‘blink’ and a slot where I could offer punch cards saying ‘TRICK OR TREAT’.
Only downside was one asshole neighbor who wouldn’t give out any candy unless you went through her mini haunted house, and I didn’t fit…
We didn’t have trick or treat … only tricks. i grew up in the country (my nearest neighbor was 2 miles away) in the ’60s.
My favourite memory was when I was 16. Me and about a half dozen other boys disassembled ole man Watkin’s new John Deere tractor and put it back together in his hay loft. Watkins was the asshole who’d shoot you with rock salt for stealing a watermelon.
It took the jerk two weeks to get the tractor out of the hayloft.
Ah yes. Pranks.
As a freshman was recruited to help with a Senior stunt involving stealing the local restaurant’s outdoor characters (think the “Big Boy” models outside midwest restaurants of many decades ago) and dropping them in the HS courtyard.
Since I had inside knowledge on how to do get access to the HS courtyard was recruited the next year to help with senior stunt involving moving the ROTC teacher’s MG into the courtyard.
After that I laid low – a good thing as the cops nabbed the people doing the senior stunts the next two years.
Don’t really have a favorite that I wore. My daughter wore a Pricess Mononoke costume last year that was outstanding. It’s from a Miyazaki animation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkWWWKKA8jY
Princes Mononoke lived with and rode wolves and that seemed just about right for my daughter who sometimes seems to exhibit feral behavior. She’s a grim reaper this year.
The only costume I recall wearing myself was for a college dorm party. I was stumped. I just looked around at everyday stuff and decided I could easily make a toothpaste tube costume. So I made a big tube of Crest as best I could and a paper fez. I wrote all the tube lettering on the costume. I was a bit surprised to find these words on the tube: “squeeze from bottom”. I put them on my costume anyway.
My favorites are mostly of my kids (now all 4 are teenagers believe it or not) as little tikes. Many good ones – my son as Harry Potter was amazing. The 4 as the Teletubbies was something to behold (I still love the pictures of Po asleep on Tinky Winkie’s shoulder riding home from trickertreating).
As a kid memories are minimal. At age 5 I won a costume contest with an incredibly non-PC “chinaman” costume my mother made for me – the prize was a newfangled crazy straw. Yeah, total 1960s.
Young adult? Won accolades with my hippie costume. Torn jeans, torn jeans jacket, marijuana t-shirt, hand-woven headband and sandals, plus a cool pipe. Didn’t tell people that these were my normal clothes in college.
Oh, best costumes for kids:
My favorites are also my kids’ costumes. My daughter was a haunted leftover one year. Her hands and face were painted green. The rest of her was covered in tin foil. And she had a label that read something like, “Meatloaf Surprise 6/2/82”
My son used to dress up as a vampire. I was good with makeup because my dad had once been a makeup artist and I learned from him (which he used to do the same for me). A few years, he was a very convincing vampire and one year we both dressed up and went together. He was such a ham; he just loved his costumes.
Now the memories from my childhood are coming back. I remember my dad making a very convincing mustache for me to wear one year, not on Halloween, but for a school play. It was a huge hit. The mustache far more than me. :o)
Though I can’t remember my own costumes (though I recall having a big, wooden trident one year), I remember loving Halloween. All that candy and, heck, for me it wasn’t too much trouble. Coming from a working class background might have something to do with it. One didn’t learn to expect much. When I got to high school, years later, the kids from wealth were much more self-entitled and that rubbed off on me. I was a track 1 kid and the other kids were all from affluence. I became a self-entitled teen with nothing much by way of reason to feel entitled. Alas, it all worked out alright.
As a performing musician, I been required to get a set of tails — yes, white tie and tails. My girlfriend and I went to a party as the empress and emperor of Japan. At the party, people kept asking me for drinks of various kinds. I finally realized they thought that I, in my elegant tails, was a hired bartender.
Alas, I’m from the era of cutting holes in an old sheet and going as a ghost or stuffing hay into some slightly larger old clothes and going as a scarecrow. No tricks and no worry about poisoned candy or razors in apples. Halloween in a small Southern textile mill town in the mid-1950s was a pretty tame celebration. The PTA Halloween carnival at our elementary school was the high point. Some of the parents could get pretty creative with the classroom that was turned into the haunted house. The year that it was a blindfold haunted house and they had us stick our hands into yukky stuff was a big hit.
Ghosts, witches…but not yet vampires, werewolves, zombies,…a lot of those films were either 20-30 years in the past or 5-10 years in the future. Or in our own extracurricular reading. Edgar Allan Poe is a gateway drug, you know.
And in the late 1950s, trick-or-treating for UNICEF was still seen as a worthy endeavor and not a dangerous plot by the global socialist Trilateral Commission black helicopter gang that wants to give animals power over humans by spreading bicycle trails.
Communists and H-bombs. That was the scary stuff.
Yeah, by the 1970s, it was razor apples and poison candy (urban legends that turned out to be badly in need of debunking) that had a lot of Americans paranoid. That messed up the holiday for quite a number of us.
I came up in the 70s — on Long Island, not a real wonderful place to be a kid in my opinion — in a so-so neighborhood, and yet Halloween was still pretty nice. Sure, our mothers checked our candy for razorblades and would throw out any homemade treats. But, heck, it was free candy — as much as you could get. We would haul a whole pillow case of it home and then go out for more.
We collected a lot of money for Unicef too. I remember how proud we were to say “Trick or treat for Unicef” and collect nickels, dimes and the occasional quarter. We were even more proud to bring our box of change to school the next day. There were rumors that one or two of the (bad) kids stole money from their boxes but I think that was very rare (even though it was a working class neighborhood and we kids worked hard for the money we got — delivering papers, mowing lawns, schlepping stuff for those neighbors too old or overwhelmed to do it themselves.
There were definitely tricks, particularly as we got older. But nothing more violent than smashed pumpkins, shaving cream on cars, eggs on houses (and each other), toilet paper on trees and some graffiti. We aspired to be thugs but were really quite lame.
It was not an idyllic childhood. Anything but. In fact, it was a rather nasty place. But Halloween was one of the bright spots. A very sweet time in an otherwise tough and dreary palate.
That echoes a lot of my memories in the small town midwest – although I think we had nice neighborhoods for kids.
My daughter and two of her friends collected about $70 for UNICEF last night. That blew me away. It seems so long since I was collecting pennies in the little milk box.
One year one of my daughters was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the other was a vampire. That was fun. 🙂
I remember one year being dressed as Fidel Castro (a bogeyman back in the very early sixties), but I had a Zorro sword as an accessory.
My favorite Halloween location was our old location near St Louis, Signal Hill Blvd in Belleville. We would get (no joke) between 800-1000 kids on a Halloween. I would sit at the end of the driveway, and there would be lines of kids 15 and 20 long almost the entire night. It was the craziest Halloween place I have ever been. We would buy a huge amount of very cheap candy, and it would all be gone. The street did not allow parents to drive. We blockaded the entire street off so no one could drive in or out. Very safe place. Kids would come from miles around. Especially a huge amount of black kids from East St Louis down the hill. Amazing.
Back in the 80s when I worked as a aircraft crash firefighter, I borrowed my silver crash suit and converted it to an ET outfit. Added a small flashlight inside the hood that made the facepiece glow from the inside and a couple of small smoke grenades. The result was awesome.
“What was your favorite Halloween costume?”
kid – witch
adult – mushrooms
middle age – Hobo Joe aka whatever I put on that day.
In 2000, I cut up an old bath mat into the numbers “2+2=5” and went as fuzzy math.
I made an elaborate ewok costume not long after the third Star Wars pic came out. Fur and everything. Loved that costume.
I felt the same way about trick or treating as a kid. My two favorite costumes were for post-college parties.
There was the time I had a railroad engineer’s cap handy, so I punched eyeholes in a sheet, put on the cap, hung a little spoon on a silver chain around my neck, and went as the ghost of Casey Jones.
But the best was at a party a lot of kids attended. I dressed in a huge inside-out paper bag (again with the eye holes). Attached to it with safety pins were dozens of little candies in their wrappers. My identity was “the inside of a trick or treat bag”, and the kids at the party got to pick off the candies, so long as they pinned the wrappers back on afterwards.
Not my costume, but the best one I recall was at an adult party. This guy walks in dressed as a table. He took a piece of plywood, cut a hole in the middle for his head, put a tablecloth on the plywood and attached place settings. And he topped his head with flowers for the centerpiece.
My favorite costume was Batman, It was made in pure plastic and very uncomfortable to wear, but you know as a good you will do anything to live up to your super heroes, I would probably wear it today too If I could fit into and get away with it.
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In 5th grade, I went as a robot: big card board box with fake reel-to-reel tapes, a white flashlight rigged up so I could ‘blink’ and a slot where I could offer punch cards saying ‘TRICK OR TREAT’. I had fun that night.
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