So another Halloween is now history. It was an absolutely
gorgeous Saturday in Colorado Springs, sunny and in the low 70s all
afternoon and early evening. I kept a mental tally of how many
groups of kids came to the door. Care to guess?
Nine.
Ahh, well. Nothing new there. Like entropy, Halloween is not
what it used to be, and knowing what we now know about sugar, that
may be for the best.
You don't buy nine candy bars at a time, so Carol and I ate far
too much chocolate for dessert this evening--and not great
chocolate either. It was the Great Big Bag of Mega-Mass-Produced
Miniature Candy Bars 'n Things. I picked the bag clean of Rolos and
Nestle's Crunch. Carol grabbed the Reese's peanut butter cups.
Tomorrow the rest of the bag goes to the big candy bowl over at
Canine Solutions. Every year it's more or less the
same: I remember how much I like Rolos, I eat a few too many of
them, and then I won't have them again until next Halloween.
Man, that's a familiar routine.
This year's Halloween brought to mind
one of
my favorite years: 1964. I was 12. It was the last full year
before puberty's hormone storms began washing over my gunwales,
though I could already hear its distant thunder. I had discovered
electronics--and the Beatles. My father was healthy. We had
a summer place, on a lake. Better still,
Halloween was on a Saturday...and it was warm! I could run around
as a Barbary pirate without three sweaters under my costume.
I got together with a couple of my friends and we ranged all
over the neighborhood, going blocks and blocks afield, and I ended
up with a pretty fat bag of sugar. Diversity was the order of the
day. There were lots more species of candy in the Halloween
ecosphere back in '64. Most of it was good. Some items I liked more
than others. A few I wouldn't touch, like the almost inexplicable
Chicken Bones. I would have traded them to my
friends for
Smarties (which, alas, now give me headaches) except
that they didn't want them either. Ditto
Mary
Janes--wouldn't touch 'em, though I remember getting a
Turkish
Taffy from my friend Art as swap for a handful. Individually
wrapped
Charms were about, if not common, though more
common than the peculiar but compelling
Choward's Violets. And
Snaps! Loved those, more for the not-quite-spicy
coating than for the underlying licorice. The small red Snaps boxes
all had "2c" printed in very big letters. Small boxes of
Atomic Fireballs and Good'n'Plenty could be had
here and there. I remember one house handing out very
stale conversation hearts, from the previous February or possibly
earlier. There used to be individually wrapped
Chuckles, which I haven't seen in a lot of years, as
well as short rolls of
Necco Wafers. I broke a tooth on a Necco wafer when I
was in high school, and haven't done them much since.
Every so often somebody would be passing out pennies. Meh--I got
whole dimes rescuing returnable soda bottles tossed into empty
lots. There was a house down on Hortense that was giving out flyers
about Lutheranism along with Tootsie Pops. The nuns at our school
were very hard on Luther, who was painted as the chief Protestant
supervillain, though he got off easy compared to Arius, who
according to Catholic legend was eaten alive by worms. And hey,
nobody hands out fliers about Arianism, with or without Tootsie
Pops.
I think you get the idea. We didn't throw rolls of toilet paper
into trees or anything like that, because it was a bad use of our
time. We were in it for the sugar, and we all knew that Halloween
on a Saturday was something we would not see again for seven years,
and with summery weather, well, in Chicago probably never.
My sugar buzz is now almost gone, and it's pretty much time to
go to bed. I don't eat a lot of sugar, and you've all seen my rants
about how sugar is making us all fat. It's not me being
inconsistent. It's about the notion of celebration, and how if we
celebrate something for too long,
that
which we celebrate becomes ordinary, and loses its magic. If I
ate Rolos all the time I'd get tired of them, and fat to boot. So I
eat them once a year. Halloween is as good a time as any, and
allows me to remember the buzz of being not-quite-grown at a time
when kids could tear around for an afternoon without adult
supervision, and no one would freak out. Like warm Halloweens on
Chicago Saturdays, such will not be seen again for a long time, if
ever.