Article Surfing Archive

I remember one house in particular on Halloween: The Jones* house. Mr. Jones was a botanist and Mrs. Jones would make homemade lemon lollipops for her trick-or-treaters. She*d come to the door with the lollipops lying on wax paper on a cookie tray, and we*d peel off the largest one we could find.

Some houses were fun because they would set up a haunted house. We might be told by a ghoul to "GO DOWN THE CELLAR STAIRS!" And we*d go down to the basement where they*d set up spooky things and we*d have to put our hand into the "bag of eyeballs" which was really a bag of wet pumpkin seeds. If we were lucky, a vampire would jump out of a coffin at us or an axe-murderer and get us to scream in equal measures of fright and delight.

When the two hours were up we*d try to sneak in one last house and then we*d head for home... if we could figure out where we were in the dark... home to count our booty! And if we were lucky, one of the children would be having a Halloween Party.

One year, the party was at my house and perhaps a dozen or more kids came and we played Bobbing for Apples with the apples floating in an old fashioned wash tub for us to try to pull out with our teeth, and of course there was a huge spider web of grey yarn tangled all over a room with prizes at the ends of the strings. And there were salted and roasted pumpkin seeds to eat and caramel apples and there were frosted pumpkin shaped sugar cookies, and probably a sandwich or two in there as well, but who notices things like that? And it was always over too soon, and we'd get tucked all excited into bed and fall asleep quickly into a sugar-induced coma.