Halloween Memories (for lack of a better blog topic)

Now that Halloween has been over for several weeks, I thought I’d write a Halloween post—in classic Sarita fashion, everything is late. Don’t worry, the Christmas post will probably come in February, along with a Christmas card. If I get around to making Christmas cards.

My dream version of Halloween appeared in the pages of Marc Brown’s Arthur’s Halloween where the kids (or, I should say, anteaters and rabbits) walk down sidewalks kicking at big piles of dried, brown oak leaves, and find the little old lady with snow white hair hiding in the upper stories of a decrepit Victorian house with shingles on the roof, waiting for trick-or-treaters to knock on her door so she could give them chocolate donuts and apple cider.

In reality, Halloween was a test of endurance. In northwest Arctic Alaska, we were lucky if it was warmer than -20 for trick-or-treating. But one of the few redeeming qualities of Halloween in Kotzebue was that we could walk wherever we were going, so if we felt the onset of frostbitten fingers and toes, we could be home in a matter of minutes.

Halloween was also very unstylish. In elementary school we had to wear costumes on top of layers of sweaters and snowsuits, fur hats, hoods, scarves, mittens, and bunny boots. That meant our costumes always had to be one or two sizes bigger to stretch over the bulk of the requisite insulation. This was not cool. You could not be a graceful angel/princess/witch/fairy waddling down the street with puffy snow pants and clompy boots exposed beneath the hem of your costume. We also had to stuff hand fulls of Kleenex in our coat pockets so we could stop every five minutes to wipe our noses that dripped incessantly from the cold. Blowing your nose outside was inconvenient. You had to stop, put everything down, and hike up the costume fabric to find your pocket, unzip it, pull out a tissue without the whole clump falling out and blowing away, etc., all before your hand got numb. The whole process of nose blowing wasted so much time that it was easier to just wipe snot trails on the back of your mittens. It was even more fun when you had to go to the bathroom.

But the prospect of being able to gorge on candy that our parents would normally never let us have dispelled all fears about looking dorky while making the rounds through town. Merella and I joyfully knocked on as many doors as we could before we froze, and were careful to avoid the following: 1) dentists, because they’d always give kids toothbrushes--lame; 2) anyone who was a doctor, because they’d only give you apples—Washington Reds—gross, it totally defeated the purpose of trick-or-treating; 3) any houses that belonged to boys who were the subjects of our latest infatuations--for obvious reasons relating to our appearances; 4) the Senior Citizen Center, because their idea of a “treat” was to make an industrial-sized bowl of fat free popcorn and mix in raisins and unshelled peanuts. When you said, “Trick-or-treat!” the staff member in charge of distributing the goods would toss a handful of the disgusting stuff into your bag. Without plastic gloves on their hands.

When we got home, before we’d even taken off our winter clothes, we’d each dump out the contents of our bags and turn the living room floor into a sea of silver and gold candy wrappers. We would barter with each other for our favorites. Nobody liked Tootsie Rolls so those were the first to go. Dad gladly took those off our hands for free. My favorite candies were the finest specimens of cavity-inducing genetically modified sugar: Blow Pops, Dots, Nerds, and anything else with red 40. Once the bartering started, it had to be gotten over quickly, because we were ordered to hand over the loot to Mom, who would then magically make it disappear. The candy would reappear only after dinner, or the completion of chores or homework.

For the rest of the year we would spend hours searching for our hidden treasure. We never found it. But we suspected it was buried in a snowdrift outside, because it was always cold and rock hard when Mom brought it out.

I suppose the benefit of this miserly distribution was that our candy didn't permanently disappear until March.