Growing up in a small Southern town the middle of the last
century, ghosts, spirits, haints – the creatures known for prowling on Halloween – were really
never that far away. Whether it was the spirit of the dead child at the
boarding house, or the otherworldly little girl in white my friends and I saw on
a deserted road one evening or even the ghost who lived with the music store owner
and her sister, the supernatural was woven into the tapestry of our lives.
No one was very shocked by it.
The music store owner and her sister not only told funny
stories about their ghost but actually liked having it around because it regularly
found lost items. One afternoon when I was walking to my parent’s store from
junior high school, I passed their house and saw through the window a shadowy
figure watching soap operas. When I told them about it 10 minutes later – they both
were working behind counter at the store – they laughed and laughed and
insisted it was a ghost.
None of this was really surprising in a county where one of
the few tourist attractions was “the ghost light” viewable down the railroad
tracks in a remote area. Generations of scientists tried to find an explanation
for it but none came up with anything better than the old tales -- that it was either a woman who had been hit by
a train or her long dead husband come looking for her.
Over the years, it was seen by virtually everyone in the
county.
As strange as it may seem, I never found Halloween to be
particularly scary until I saw the movie “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and realized
the possibilities. (Because it was less visual, reading the book had not had
the same effect.) In that movie, the scary creatures were very much alive, however.
My theory is that Halloween only surpassed mild scariness
when adults took over what had been a child’s holiday somewhere around the 80s
or 90s.
To me, the holiday wasn’t about being afraid anyway. It was
about food.
Back when the best trick-or-treat loot was homemade, my
mother went all out – both caramel and candied apples, translucent amber
lollipops and moist cupcakes decorated to look like black cats, witches,
pumpkins, whatever came to her mind. It was magical what she could do with
strings of licorice, peppermint Lifesavers and striped candy corn triangles.
While no one else did it quite as well as Mama – I’m biased,
I know – everyone in our neighborhood was offering freshly prepared treats.
Giving out Hershey bars or candy corns was a last resort only for the busiest
or most cooking-averse mothers.
Most of the treats we got weren’t wrapped, let alone X-rayed
at the local hospital. Any “poisoning” was self-inflected and the result of way
too much sugar.
Trick-or-treat night wasn’t the only opportunity to eat too
many sweets. Every year, we went to the local Halloween carnival across town. It
was usually the first chilly night of the season, and I was wearing the latest
iteration of a corduroy coat – often red – over that year’s costume. The air
was aromatic with burning leaves and carnival food.
As soon as we got there, I always headed to the same place. It
was a great point of pride for me that my mother’s baked goods played such a starring
role at the popular cake walk. I loved watching the mobs of carnival-goers
compete to take home one of her luscious German chocolate, or spice or
lemon-coconut cakes; they were tall and beautiful with swirls of sea foam icing
in white or pastels.
For those of you too young to understand, in a cake walk, a
group of people bought a ticket for the right to circle chairs to music and
quickly sit down when the music stopped. Because a chair was removed after each
round, someone invariably was left without a place to sit and would be
eliminated The last person sitting won a cake.
My problem was that I really loved the cake walk but
considered it unfair – and certainly unnecessary – to compete when one of my
mother’s cakes was featured as the prize. That meant sitting out almost half
the rounds.
When I finally did win a cake, it was a luscious caramel
cake baked by a family friend. As unnecessary as my victory was – the woman was
happy to bake the cake for us anytime we asked – I still savored my victory as
much as the moist yellow cake with sugary icing.
As if a year’s worth of sugar hadn’t been or wasn’t going to
be ingested on trick-or-treat night, the carnival featured cotton candy and
more candied apples, occasionally balanced by buttery, salty cones of popcorn.
All of this was washed down with apple cider which, drunk after a sugary treat,
tasted a bit like a laboratory specimen.
Yet, by the time we climbed in the Pontiac to go home well
after dark, I was a content little girl. My parents invariably smelled of some
carnival treat – popcorn, burnt sugar or hot dogs – because they had been
working in a booth to support a charity backed by the fire department, the
Rotary Club, hospital auxiliary or some other group. I would watch their
silhouettes from my perch in the middle of the back seat, literally too
exhausted and hyped up on sugar to sleep.
We all knew Halloween was a turning point and not just from
the oppressive heat of summer to pleasant, crisp days.
The last high school football game usually was played around
that time, and Homecoming was long past. It was close to a month before the
holiday decorations would be unpacked at the family clothing store. Now, we
were focused on the next big event in our household: Thanksgiving.
