The Season

Halloween was not a deal in my childhood house.  My mother resented having to buy candy "we're just going to give away."  Nor did she like "having to wait around" for children to come to the door and interrupt whatever was going on.  Still, we carved pumpkins.  One year, we even bought a plug-in pumpkin with its own light.  That was quite remarkable, as electric decorations (with the exception of Christmas lights on houses) were not very common.

Still, I did go trick-or-treating.  Once, I went as a cheerleader when my friend next door went as a football player.  (Not sure "paired" costumes were a thing then, either.)  We were warned against razor blades in apples one year, though no child that I knew was going to eat an apple when there was a bag of candy at hand.  😏  Chocolate hadn't come into its own yet as a common handout, unless you went to "fancy, expensive" houses.  Mostly, there were hard candies, lollipops, SweeTarts, bubble gum, Kits (Ben Franklin penny candy, anyone?)  Then, there were these:

Oh, we hated these awful things.  Even if you did want to eat one (why?  WHY?), pieces of the wax paper were stuck to the candy when you unwrapped it.  There were always tons of those in our bags.  They must have been the cheapest candy to buy, plus, I guess, the orange and black. . .  Still. . .

On the "cheap" thread: how did we not suffocate in those miserable plastic character masks, and the stiff rayon "clothes" that cost, what two or three dollars?  That thin, thin plastic string that held the mask on our faces always broke, sometimes while we were trick-or-treating.  If you had a stapler in your house, you'd try to fix it, but it didn't work.  The elastic was too thin to be caught by the staple.  Scotch tape?  Fine, but the tape would stick you in the face.  How did we survive all those tough times?