October brings fond memories for me. Because my brother’s birthday was October 31st, Halloween was always a big deal for our family. This was before the time that some people considered Halloween a bad thing. Anyway, we always had a big costume party for my brother and I, as the little sister, looked forward to the special day for months.
My mom and my grandmother always got really into it. Mom blindfolded each of the kids and then they walked through the ghoul’s room. Each child had to put his or her hands into bowls that held various peoples’ body parts. Back then, imagination was a big part. You couldn’t just go to a store to buy things to spark scary thoughts. Besides, was more fun to create and cheaper!
One of the bowls held cooked macaroni with oil, which was supposed to be a human brain. We peeled grapes for days to fill the bowl meant to be eyeballs. We shucked corn and used the husks for the hair of some lucky dead person. Liver was used for the heart, if I remember correctly. We made teeth out of some kind of clay that hardened in the oven. She saved the bones that she had used for soups oxtail, I think! I also remember her buying knuckle bones at the meat market for something else…what I can’t tell you.
Then the costume idea came into play. The year that my brother was the Headless Horseman, from Washington Irving’s THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW was my favorite. It was really a cool costume and since we lived in Irvington, New York at the time, all kids always were a bit nervous about the whole story of Ichabod Crane and the headless horseman anyway. Mom starched an old white shirt of my fathers. Back then, starch was liquid and hardened clothes to the point of no return.
She cut tiny eye holes in the front and rigged it up so that it really looked like a headless horseman. Then the piece de la resistance was the head/mask that she managed to connect under the black jacket’s arm. It was an ugly mask. I still remember it.
Well, the party was a great success until my grandmother began to tell her true ghost story.(For those of you who had read my previous newsletters, that grandmother was Nahnee, the fudge making grandmother.) That year, only one of the kids wanted to go home early. Later, though Mom got two calls from the parents of kids who were having a hard time going to sleep. Mom always told the parents about what would be going on at our haunted house but I guess some parents didn’t think about it until afterward.
That year, I was ten and my brother was celebrating his fourteenth birthday. Gosh, how times have changed. Back then we could safely go trick or treating. We were courteous…always said thank you even if our treat was an apple! The high point was trick or treating for UNICEF and our pride in how much we collected for needy children all over the world when we turned the UNICEF container filled with pennies or maybe even nickles the next day at school.
