Boo! I’ve always loved Halloween. Hauling home tons of candy is what pillow cases were really invented for! Tons of FREE candy, I might add. When you’re five, six or seven years old, it just doesn’t get any better.
I considered chocolate bars to be the best score, apples the worst. Who wants fruit on Halloween? Get real. Apples? Oranges? They just weigh your bag down — and these days, parents throw them all out anyway.
No fruit — just sugar. It’s all every kid wants and all any kid ever wanted. Enough hardcore candy to be high on sugar for at least a week. And that can be a good thing, because you can actually get a little sick of it and lay off the candy for a while.
That usually doesn’t happen, though, because the parents eat half of it anyway, while lying through their chocolate/licorice-coated teeth that they haven’t. Hey, we have rights. Stealing our kids’ and grandkids’ candy is one of them. I mean, we’re sacrificing our bodies to keep the little darlings healthy, right? Right.
Of course, equally fun on Halloween is the spooky part: the costumes. Witches, goblins, superheroes — even a whining Donald Trump will, no doubt, be popular this year. A lot of money will be made on blonde wigs this season.
On the darker side (spooky music in), this is a "grave" time of year for those of us born with vivid imaginations.
I strongly remember, when I was a kid of five or six, lying in bed around Halloween with my window open a bit and standing right outside it — outlined against the bright moonlight — were a witch (pointy hat included) and a fox, talking about where to find the juiciest kids in town to eat that night. I was afraid to breathe in case they heard me. And I was positive I couldn’t jump out of bed, run to the hall and down the stairs to Mom and Dad before they’d catch me and gobble me up! Scary, wonderful times.
It didn’t help to have a brother 10 years older than I am, with an equally vivid imagination and a healthy "evil" side to go with it. But the good evil, you know?
For example: When I was seven or so (during our years living in Killarney — we moved to Winnipeg in 1957 when I was nine years old), I heard a cougar had been spotted two or three miles south of town and to keep an eye out for it. So I asked my then-17-year-old brother, Bob, "What’s a cougar?" Big mistake.
He said, "Well you know what a lion is."
I said yes.
"A cougar," he explained, "has the body of a lion but the head and very sharp claws of an alligator, so it can climb up the outside walls of houses at night, sneak in and eat the sleeping children."
I screamed.
We lived in a big old cement stone two-storey house at the time and, at bedtime — with the lights out — I lay in bed staring at my window, terrified, for weeks. Good one, bro. Proud of you.
Then we moved into the city — to a real haunted house — and "spooky" became a year-round reality.
Some time after the Mustards had moved out of that house, I spoke with the new owner about life there, she said she once saw a little girl with long red hair go up the front steps into the house, followed her in just to see her go upstairs and, when she got up there to ask why she was in the house, there was no little girl.
True story. BOO! Have a safe and happy Halloween — and no apples!
lmustard1948@gmail.com
