A Tale of Two Kinder-GARNERS, Part Two: Halloween 2015 vs Halloween 1991.

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pumpkinashley

We all went to kindergarten together in my post a few months ago, so let’s trick or treat together too, k?

I have bought into the madness just like the rest of you mommies. I’ve made marshmallow ghosts and pipe cleaner spiders carrying Blow Pops. I’ve read all the articles detailing that skull-shaped candy isn’t actually candy, but drugs. I’ve told my kids they are not to eat any unwrapped candy or homemade anything this weekend, lest it be concealing a razor blade that would kill them dead. We have glow sticks. We have a schedule. We have pomp and circumstance and flora and fauna and all the other things Pinterest is telling us to have. HALLOWEEN 2015 IS SO ON.

…Remember Halloween in 1991? I do. It was a little less… “On.”

A little less… Precious, gluten free, teal painted, and glow stick laden. It wasn’t creative. It wasn’t a big deal. It was polyester from a store and candy mountains. It was a little like this…

1. Class parties now:

I’m a little fuzzy on this, because my son goes to a private Christian school. So we are going to a pumpkin patch and had a fall craft party a few weeks ago. (My fellow brethren who are down with the G-O-D aren’t so much about the whole “glorifying All Hallows’ Eve” thing, so I’m going on what I have been told goes down in the classrooms of the public school variety.)

No peanuts, no gluten, no sugar for some kiddos. Stick to a theme, decorate, make sure each kid has a treat sack. (Bonus points for festive shapes and non-GMO ingredients.) Parents are welcomed, costumes are not. Jack o’ Lanterns will be carved and judged based on creativity and fitting in with the “overall school theme” or how well they fit into a literary category.

Class parties 1991:

Chase Benton had pulled me under a round table during center time and kissed me on the cheek about a month after school started. My mother thought a Queen of Hearts costume would be hilarious and coy. My father thought of how he could kill a 5 year old boy and get away with it. (Note: Chase suffered no harm and is alive and well and a Facebook friend… Hey boy hey.) All of my peers and I wore our store-bought costumes and consumed so much sugar, I think I remember my teacher hiding behind her desk. Everyone got loaded up on candy and colored paper pumpkins, then we were dismissed promptly at 1pm. (This was kindergarten, after all).

2. Costumes now:

Come with me, my pretties, to Halloween two years ago. Maddox wanted to be a baseball player. I reached out to a girlfriend and secured a real tee ball uniform for him! He was so excited! Until 3 days before Halloween. Until he wanted to be a coyote. Yes. A coyote. That dog/wolf looking critter who eats chickens and outside trash. Do y’all know that a coyote costume isn’t actually a thing? 72 hours of relentless begging from me and of showing him tee ball uniforms yielded no budging. Halloween 2013 I used a day of PTO and spent it making a coyote costume. Remember the finger knitting craze of our childhoods? Thank God I did. I sourced enough fuzzy yarn for tails/chest fur/furry adornments to send 12 year old me into a full on finger knitting resurgence.IMG_3128

I am not alone here. (Or if I am just tell me that you too lost your minds to make me feel a smidge better, please?) Handmade witty costumes are the new hot ticket item. Babies dressed as a burrito. Teens with matching dresses and cardboard TY Beanie Baby tags around their necks. Even us old folk, dressed as Flo and Mayhem, taking the party and Trick or Treat scene by storm.

If you don’t have a handmade, witty costume in the works, don’t fret! There are entire pop up stores consuming mall parking lots nowadays. Plastic pools and dorm gear have been pushed to clearance end caps to accommodate princesses, superheros, and scary characters of every size, shape, and flame retardant variety.

Costumes 1991:

I remember feeling sorry for the kids whose parents made them a costume. “Little Billy’s daddy lost his job and he has 4 brothers and sisters.  That’s why his mom had to sew his outfit.  It wouldn’t be nice to say anything about it,other than you think he is a very scary ghost,”my mother informed me in a hushed tone. Not really knowing what that meant, but knowing that if a Southern woman whispered about someone to you it meant something really bad, I minded my manners and ran up and down the aisles of Kmart until I found my perfect dream costume: Belle. In the plastic packaging, it looked just like everything I would ever have imagined.  Out of the package? Even my little 5 year old eyes knew it probably would last for a half hour at best before the shoddy seams gave way and I was standing in the street looking more like Cinderella after the step- sisters got to her than a regal, Beast loving bookworm.  Even so, in my 50 layers, I soldiered on up and down Gateway Lane.  Which brings me to my next point: 

3. Trick or Treating now:

Just like any self respecting suburb-dwelling mother, we will be trunk or treating. After we trunk or treat, I will load up my brood into my 3rd row SUV, and use all that V8 power to troll up and down the streets (only the ones that look safe/well lit/respectable/not like the back lot of every horror movie since 1979) and let my kids out in front of everyone’s doors.

Listen, I know I come off as a mean sarcastic hag 90% of the time. But hear me when I say this, I fault NO ONE at all for not letting kids in this day and age free roam with their buddies all over the creation at night searching for candy. I hate to be “that mom” and fear-mongering is so not my bag, but 2015 is spades different from the days when all we had to worry about was Michael Myers in our sheets or Freddie under the bed. So, carry on, fellow gas guzzlers with your 38 cup holders and heated leather seats.

Trick or Treating 1991:

Bradley lived a few houses down and across the street lived David. They bought me a rubber duckie for my 1st birthday and I thought they were the coolest human beings to ever live. At about 12 years old, they seemed like perfect companions for little 5 year old Ashley Belle to go roaming the neighborhood with. They wore scary masks and had pillow cases for their candyIMG_3130 (I had a plastic, white McDonald’s bucket because 1991) but together, in a pack of other sugar crazed chocolate seekers, we roamed South Knoxville neighborhoods while our parents stayed home and passed out  ate Halloween candy.

4. Candy sorting now: 

As I touched on earlier, the world is cray. Every morsel of candy that my kids bring into the house will be thoroughly sorted and inspected. After I make sure they aren’t going to ingest SARS, Mersa, or Ebola, I will hand them their sugary goodies. (Later I will yell at them for climbing the walls because I will be too busy eating their Reese’s to realize they just ate 59 Pixie Stix each and can now see sounds).

Candy sorting 1991:

After Bradley and David walked me to my door, I dumped out my spoils onto our linoleum floor and marveled at the loot. I had never seen so much junk. As the daughter of a nurse, I was never allowed junk food. There are few pleasures as sweet as sitting in a candy mountain surrounded by so much candy goodness you can never imagine how it could all get eaten.

5. Sheer volume of Halloween today: 

My house has been decorated since September 19th. I have 5 boxes of tombstones, spooky lights, skulls, etc. We already have a small cardboard moving box full of candy, as we have already been to several Halloween-themed events.

I have printed out templates to carve a Storm Trooper, a T-rex, and an Angry Bird. We have a carving kit that is advertised on the box to turn the carver into a sculpting genius, but is actually about as sharp as a toothpick and inevitably breaks somewhere around the 3rd jab into the pumpkin.

Sheer volume of Halloween 1991: 

It was one day. I had a pumpkin. My dad carved a basic face on it wielding a kitchen knife. My mom was furious because she had just ordered it from a Tupperware type party.

Pete Michaels (yes, the one on the radio) lived in our neighborhood and had a Halloween party; my mother gossiped about how extravagant that seemed. “Its just Halloween,” she’d say. “I’m not really sure what all the fuss is about.”

Again, just like my last “then and now post,” I’m not really sure which side of the road I am standing on here. While I yearn for the simpler time when kids could run around being kids, eating homemade Rice Crispy Treats from the sweet old lady at the cul-de-sac, I LOVE the imagination and care put into holiday details in the present day.

Just please. Don’t ask me to finger knit any more costumes again.IMG_3127

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