Halloween now is the time of year where we all dress up two thirds of nights and freeze our butts off walking from party to party all weekend long. But Halloween didn’t use to be like this. Before red plastic cups, we had big plastic baskets that we brought along as we went house to house begging neighbors and strangers alike to give us a trick or a treat. Halloween night is one of those special events that even if we all lived in different towns and states, we probably had some of the same exact experiences.
- Fighting with your parents about wearing a jacket or long sleeve shirt under your costume
This one applies to all of those that get to experience the season of fall. There was nothing worse than getting in your costume and thinking you look SO good until your mom comes up to you and tells you to wear a jacket or you’re going to catch cold. “But Mooooom, it doesn’t go with my costume! Pirates/Vampires/Princesses/[insert your own costume here] don’t wear coats I’ll be fine, it’s not that cold out!” After what felt like hours of deliberating, you most likely lost and had to wear a jacket or caught a cold. Either way, your mom was right. But don’t worry, I don’t think anyone was judging you as a seven-year-old for wearing a coat in late October. In fact, I’m jealous and wish I could wear a coat.
2. That one neighbor that gives the full-size to all their favorite kids
This neighbor was almost always the sweet old lady that your parents had somehow befriended. Nothing made you feel cooler than when she left one of her kids to keep handing out the fun-size candy to the other kids while she went to go get you a full-size bar. Bonus points if she fanned out all the options she had and let you pick what you wanted.
3. The house that always goes hard (in a fun way)
There’s always that one house in every neighborhood that always goes all out with decorations. Cobwebs, huge spiders, fake skeletons, eerie lights. These houses were always the most fun to go to because they felt more like a cool attraction than one stop on your trick-or-treating journey. You knew the decorations were cool when you were happy there was a line in their yard because it meant you had more time to look around. They also always have the best candy.
4. The house that always goes hard (in a scary way)
This house goes similarly hard as the fun house, but the main difference is that the people who decorated this house decided to make it their mission to traumatize as many children as possible that night. They always had spooky background music that played, decorations that move and talk to you and they had the scariest costumes on. Your mom probably had to give you a pep talk to even step on their property and then another one before you went up the step to get your candy. If this house decides that they want to be extra trauma-inducing (like the ones from my childhood decided to be), then there was probably another person hiding in the coffin that’s laying in the yard to jump out and scare kids as they go down the walkway.
5. The holy ritual of trading candy at the end of the night
Hands-down, the best part of Halloween was getting home, taking off the uncomfortable parts of your costume, and trading candy with all the friends your parents took you out with. Never have you ever negotiated as hard in your life then you did as a child on Halloween. You would put any businessman to shame. Not only was the actual trading fun, but you were still riding off the high that your mom let you stay up this late (five out of seven probability it was a school night) and that high was only increased by the amount of candy you were consuming.
Bonus
6. Cabbage Night
I’ve been told by multiple sources that this is not a thing in their towns, so this may just be something that happened where I grew up or exclusively in dominantly Irish-Catholic neighborhoods. Cabbage night is the night before Halloween where a bunch of kids in the neighborhood (mainly 13 to15 year-olds) will go around and wreak havoc. They’ll throw eggs at houses, Toilet-paper trees and cover every fence and hedge with silly string. Let me be clear that this is not necessarily a good tradition and that I never participated, but it was always interesting assessing all the damage on the way to the bus stop on Halloween morning.