Column: Childhood Halloween memories remembered with fondness
Published 12:00 am Thursday, October 27, 2005
By Love Cruikshank, Tribune columnist
I didn’t walk until I was 14 months old, to the consternation of my family. That would have been in February. So I must have been at least 22 months old when I hit the Halloween trail.
My friend, Eloise Adams, asked me the other night how much I remembered about my early celebrations. Plenty. When she reads this column she may be sorry she asked.
My first three Halloweens were much alike. I toddled out into the night, my right hand held by my mother, my father carrying the cardboard head of a black cat (sometimes it was a cardboard pumpkin) with a lighted candle inside.
Daddy lighted the candle as we approached the house of our destination. Then he gave the cat or whatever to my mother, lifted me up to peer through the window and my mother handed the lighted whatever to me to hold up to the window.
I regarded this as great fun. Looking back, I don’t know why. Maybe it was because, even at that age, I was something of a ham and greatly enjoyed the moment when the inhabitants rushed out to congratulate my parents on their astonishing offspring.
My parents, poor things, actually believed the compliments. We usually confined our parade to only those houses in our own block, but it seemed to me that we had gone half way around the world. I loved it.
There was never any mention of treats either then nor in the sense of today’s celebration. There were lots of parties, though. I was invited to many birthday parties from the time I was four years old. My first Halloween party came when I lacked two months of being six years old.
My mother, who sewed like a professional, made my costume, a clown suit. Half of it was orange and half black. Using cardboard, she made three large buttons to decorate the front. They were covered with fluffy orange and black yarn. I had a tall pointed hat to match the costume.
In my part of Nebraska, weather was a bit warmer in October than it is here. In fact, I remember one year when family and friends all put their bathing suits on and went swimming at the old mill where we always swam at that time. It was a bit more chilly than it was in the summer, but no one suffered frost bite.
My mother didn’t want me to wear a coat over my beautiful costume, so she had me wear a sweater under it. I was in that era a skinny child, but the sweater fattened me up considerably.
Indeed, as far as I was concerned, the party got off to a bad start. Before we unmasked, some
man belonging to the household gave me the once-over and then inquired, &8220;And who is this fat little boy?&8221;
Neither at that stage of my life nor later did I ever yearn to be a boy.
That party left a great deal to be desired. There were games. The one I remember was a get-acquainted game. I don’t remember it too well. It involved going up to someone and reading from a list pinned to his back and then writing the name in a little notebook given you for the purpose.
I was the shortest kid there. I couldn’t even see what was on the lists let alone read them. However, the older kids took note of my problem and helped me some, not enough to get me a prize, but too much to enable me to win the booby prize.
And winning a prize was important to me. I never bought that bit about &8220;It isn’t if you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.&8221; I wanted a prize, no matter what. But I won nothing.
Things did get worse. Because of my size I was given my choice between sitting at the table on a large dictionary to eat my refreshments or sitting on the floor to eat them. I chose the floor.
I don’t remember what I was given to eat. I think we were given cider to drink. At that period of my life, though, I was not familiar with cider and reported when I got home that I’d been given grape juice.
It didn’t make much difference anyway because someone prancing kicked it over. It was all over the rug. They mopped it up and kept telling me not to mind, it wasn’t my fault.
I knew it wasn’t. I even knew whose fault it was. Only child though that I was, I grew up in a clan with more cousins than I could count and learned early in life the advantages of not snitching.
A year later at a Halloween party sponsored by the Girls Friendly Society in the undercroft of the St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, I won a prize for being able to stand on one foot longer than anyone else.
I was given a little box of embroidered handkerchiefs. I didn’t particularly want a box of embroidered handkerchiefs, but I was so happy to be winning a prize that they couldn’t get me back on both feet for the rest of the evening.
(Love Cruikshank is an Albert Lea resident. Her column runs Thursday.)