Halloween

A ferocious ocelot, circa 1973.

Traditionally, Halloween has been my favorite holiday - forget Christmas and definitely forget Easter if you are doing a childhood thrills comparison. Halloween had it all in my young mind. It had the creativity of coming up with the best costume idea ever (I never had nor wanted a store bought one). Then there was the task of talking my mother into some much despised sewing and/or creative gluing. After it was completed there came the ultimate joy of disguising yourself to run, transformed, through the darkening neighborhood; the crunch of leaves at my sneakers and the tang of fireplace smoke in the air. The amazing fragrance of carved pumpkin and the delicious smell of it's seeds roasting in the oven. Then, the best part - at least from the perspective of someone with a chocolate covered heart : The Grand Finale...free candy! And wondrously, the free candy came from threatening people to trick them (pumpkin stomping and TP-ing were popular in our neighborhood) if they didn't hand over their treats with a smile. Ah, publicly sanctioned juvenile delinquency. This is the children's holiday of holidays.

The soundtrack to my Halloweens - I sitll have the record.

In spite of having an open door to creativity, usually my Halloween costumes were decidedly feline in nature. I tended to fancy the big cats, ocelots mainly. But I also got a little out there with a robot cat and "the cat from outer space" complete with antennae. Once in a while I broke out of the mold and was a hobo. Then back into the mold with "Hobo Cat." My mother dressed up as a witch every year - her make-up becoming more and more gruesome as the years passed -would turn our front porch into some sort of horror house tableau where she would hunch over a big cast iron pot filled with dry ice and cow bones. (Can you guess who else's favorite holiday was Halloween?) She'd offer brown paper lunch sacks filled with icky things for the more adventurous trick or treaters to feel:  glycerin covered grapes (monster eye balls), oily spaghetti (monster guts)...you get the picture. The kids that could stand putting their hand in each sack got a bigger piece of candy. The sound track to all of this fun was Walt Disney's The Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of The Haunted House. This was a special effects LP put out for "older children, teenagers, and adults."  When I listen to it now it seems pretty tame with the exception of the racist bits. That is scary but just in a different way. What the album does have is some spectacular screams - one in particular that I can still do a fair copy of.

Putrinella

Last year I found myself in a dispirited frame of mind regarding Halloween.  The thrills of my youth were gone (45 is a tad old for trick or treating). I was living in a part of the country where I barely knew any body (so no party invitations) and I missed my mother's Halloween enthusiasm. Then, a much needed shot in the arm of the Halloween celebratory spirit came my way at the last minute. During one of our weekly trips to Grocery Outlet, we discovered her:  Putrinella - one of the most disturbing Halloween decorations ever. A true Halloween mascot. She is a nightmare kitty with an evil red, gluey mouth and slimy matted hair that off-gassed plastic fumes for weeks. My partner and I were immediately struck by a vision of thousands of these things piled up on conveyor belts in a factory in China. Did the workers wonder about our culture's strange needs as the terrible cats were constructed on their assembly line? Did the workers have respiratory problems from breathing the horrible fumes? Did they have bad dreams? Those are questions too disturbing for Halloween, perhaps.

The family (and a couple of neighbors) circa 1976.

So, Putrinella-inspired, we decorated our postage stamp-sized front porch. We carved up three lovely pumpkins (seed roasting ensued shortly thereafter), put on the beloved haunted house record, placed candy in a large bowl, threw up a few fake spider webs and lit some votive candles to show off Putrinella's macabre glory....and no one came. Not one child. The worst part of it was that we don't live way out in the country - we live in an apartment complex filled with children. Occasionally we would see a group of children go by, laughing - taunting, it felt like as they spurned our Halloween offerings. We asked ourselves: is Putrinella too scary? Did her fumes drive the children away? Is Halloween something that you need to give up and grow out of? Maybe...but I sometimes I really wish I was 10 years old again.