Think back to when you were little.  Did you have a lot of trick-o-treaters come by your house?  Did you parents even let you go door-to-door?  Did you walk up onto a porch only to find your neighbor dressed scary and running a chainsaw to scare the crap out of you?!  Did you carve pumpkins and find the next morning someone trashed the entire block by smashing them?

As a child, I lived on the same block from the age of 2 until I was 15.  For quite some time there were approximately 20 children living on my immediate block so there was never a dull moment.  Figure in all the children in the surrounding blocks, on Halloween I bet my dad had to hand out candy to several hundred children.  If you looked up and down the street you could see nothing but kids clogging the sidewalks.  There were boys dressed as Batman, girls dressed as a princess, teens dressed in baggy clothes but wearing either a mask or scary makeup and of course the parent who decided to dress up as a Whoopie Cushion.

As I got older my sister, our best friends and I would all go together and come home with a pillow case full of candy.  My mom would then load us all up and drive out to one particular house where it was known all over town you could get a can of pop (I always got Sprite) and a full sized candy bar.  The guy who owned the monstrosity home was also the owner of the local Coca-Cola warehouse.

I want that time back.  I want to be able to take my children (whenever I have them) door-to-door and let them experience the fun of saying, “Trick-o-Treat!”  It’s just not the same saying those words inside a mall where you walk up to a “station” that is lamely decorated for the holiday, but the days of door-to-door are over.  They say it’s not that you have to fear someone will poison the candy or put razor blades in the apples (I never received an apple my entire Trick-o-Treating career), you have to fear about someone grabbing your child, or other worse things.  Times have definitely changed and I have a feeling it’s not done “changing” for the worse.

But the reason for my Halloween memory post is that today I received an email from my mom telling me how much she misses making our costumes and going out for the evening to get our loot.  She also reminded me of the first time I ever dressed up for Halloween.  I was the typical pumpkin, and a cute one too!  Imagine a little pumpkin girl with lots of little blonde curls sticking out from under her pumpkin stem hat—at the cute age of three.  Thank goodness I wasn’t in my costume when the first kid rang our doorbell though.  I was there at the door when my mother greeted the group of kids and I was so scared from their costumes I peed my pants!  When I did so I was standing by the front door and right over the return vent.  I didn’t move.  I just wet myself in fear.  I’m sure some crocodile tears were involved, knowing me.  When we got back later that night and I had filled up my little orange plastic pumpkin, my mom says she remembers clearly what I asked her as they were taking off my costume:

“Can we do that again tomorrow night?!”