Halloween as a Gen X Kid: A Report

Halloween as a Gen X Kid: A Report

If you were born between 1965 and 1980, you trick-or-treated in a different country. It had the same streets and the same houses. Nobody was watching you.

This is a report from that country, for anyone who wasn't there, and for those of us who still can't believe we came back.

The costume came in a box

Your costume came from the drugstore in a box with a cellophane window. Inside were two things. The first was a plastic mask held on by one thin elastic band, stapled to the mask and, by the end of the night, more or less to your face. The second was a plastic smock with a picture of the character on the front, in case anyone was unclear on who you were supposed to be.

The eyeholes were placed by someone who had never met a child. You could see or you could breathe. Within ten minutes the inside of the mask was wet, and you spent the rest of the night with it pushed up on your forehead like a welder on break.

Everyone remembers the mouth slit, because everyone stuck their tongue through it, cut their tongue, and then did it again. Around the third house the elastic snapped, and you held your face on with one hand until you got home. The smock smelled like a new shower curtain and swished when you walked, and if you ran, the crotch gave out. Nobody mentioned that the entire outfit was basically kindling.

If your family didn't do store-bought, you were a ghost. That meant a bedsheet with two holes cut in it, and it was always the wrong sheet. You heard about it until Thanksgiving.

Or you were a baby. A lot of girls went as a baby, because it required nothing. You wore your own pajamas and carried a bottle all night. I still carry a bottle around in the evenings. It's just wine now.

And if you lived anywhere cold, none of this mattered, because your mother made you wear your winter coat over it. An entire generation of Midwestern kids went trick-or-treating as a puffy coat with a superhero's head.

Before you left, there was the photo. It was one of maybe four pictures taken of you all year, so it counted. You lined up in front of the fireplace with your cousins while somebody's dad, cigarette in hand, told you to say "trick-or-treat" and took exactly one shot. That's the picture your mother still has on the fridge.

Supervision was not included

The week before, you watched It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, because it was on TV once a year. If you missed it, you waited until next October.

Our parents' entire safety plan was "Stay together." That was it. They didn't know which streets we'd take, who we were with, or when we'd be back, and they didn't ask. We were handed a flashlight with batteries from the junk drawer and released into the night like doves at a wedding.

We carried pillowcases. Plastic pumpkins were for amateurs and toddlers. A pillowcase meant you intended to cover several neighborhoods and possibly cross into another zip code.

Some kids also carried a little orange UNICEF box and collected change for charity. This made you the most virtuous kid on the block and also the loudest, because it rattled the whole way.

We stayed out until the porch lights went off or somebody's older brother started throwing eggs, whichever came first. Then we walked home in the dark, a pack of nine-year-olds in plastic masks. In any other month, that's a call to the police.

The haunted house in somebody's garage

Every neighborhood had one family who went all in. They turned their garage or basement into a haunted house, and it was the most terrifying and least convincing thing you had ever seen.

You walked through a hallway of black trash bags in the dark. Somebody's mom, dressed as a witch, made you reach into a bowl of peeled grapes and told you they were eyeballs. The cold spaghetti was brains. A record of creaking doors and screams played on a loop from a stereo you could clearly see.

Then the dad, in a rubber mask, sitting perfectly still in a lawn chair, lunged at you. Everyone knew he was going to do it. The kid ahead of you had warned you. You screamed anyway, and so did the kid behind you, and one year so did a grown man.

The great razor blade scare

Somewhere in the 1970s, our parents became convinced that strangers were hiding razor blades in apples. They warned us every year, with total certainty, and then sent us out to knock on those strangers' doors.

When we got home, everything went through inspection on the kitchen table. Anything homemade went in the trash. Popcorn balls, caramel apples, the cookies Mrs. Kowalski had been making since the Nixon administration, all of it gone. Anything with a torn wrapper was confiscated, and the confiscated pile was somehow always mostly Reese's.

Years later, a sociologist went looking for actual cases of strangers poisoning Halloween candy and concluded the threat had been wildly exaggerated. Nobody told our parents. They're still checking.

Every house had a grade

Every kid knew the grades, and they spread fast. A house with full-size candy bars was a legend. A house with McDonald's gift certificates was a religious experience. People talked about those houses in the cafeteria until Christmas.

At the bottom were the raisin house, the house that handed out oranges like we'd stopped by for breakfast, the house with pennies, and the dentist, who gave out toothbrushes and was, in his way, the scariest thing we saw all night.

In between was the candy nobody asked for and everybody got. Necco wafers, which were chalk with a marketing budget. Bit-O-Honey, Sugar Daddies, Sugar Babies, and Jolly Ranchers, which between them pulled out more teeth than the Tooth Fairy ever paid for. And those peanut butter taffies in orange and black wax paper that came from no store anyone has ever located.

There were also candy cigarettes, so you could stand around like your parents, and wax lips, which you wore for about a minute and then chewed for reasons no one has ever explained.

Then there were Pop Rocks. Every kid in America knew that if you ate Pop Rocks and drank soda at the same time, your stomach would explode. We knew this because it had happened to Mikey, the kid from the Life cereal commercial. It had not happened to Mikey. We ate them anyway, slowly, the way adults handle fireworks.

The sort

Back home, you dumped the pillowcase on the living room carpet and sorted. Chocolate in one pile. Trading material in another. The emergency candy went in the back of the closet, where you'd find it at Easter and eat it anyway.

Then a parent wandered through and collected the candy tax. Nobody ever discussed the rate.

And now we're the ones with the bowl

These days we're the adults on the porch, and Halloween has changed. A lot of kids trick-or-treat for 40 minutes in a church parking lot, out of the trunks of SUVs. Their parents walk three steps behind with the kid's location open on their phones.

Nobody comes home dragging a pillowcase anymore, and nobody's mother is in the kitchen throwing out popcorn balls.

We hand out full-size bars, because we remember what that house meant. Then, at the end of the night, we sort what's left in the bowl and collect the candy tax. Nobody discusses the rate.