Trick or Treat

Terry and Brenda Todt and family in 1994

Earlier this week, I was telling my son tales about the Halloweens gone by, the real Halloweens back home in Raymond. It was the good old days, back before there were superstores and access to all kinds of fancy costumes and decor. We had the same stuff to work with year after year, and it was stored in a big cardboard box way up on the top shelf of a closet. About a week before Halloween, Dad would use a ladder to get it down. The box was full of old masks and various props, and you had to be creative and use your imagination to reinvent yourself year after year.

The masks were old and uncomfortable. They were made out of hard plastic and you could barely breathe, let alone see out of them. They were held on your head by a thin elastic band that itched and always got tangled in your hair or ended up snapping you in the face. The “costumes” were usually clothes that were too big or worn out, and you had to use real ingenuity to get your costume together.

The days leading up to Halloween were exciting. You selected the perfect pumpkin(s), carved them, and made sure you had a supply of candles. Various clubs and organizations like 4-H, Scouts, and church groups hosted hay rides that cruised through the countryside after dark before making a couple of passes through town, leaving a hay trail on the streets. My mom always worried about hayrides because she thought they were too dangerous. I thought hayrides were great fun. What could possibly be dangerous about fifty unruly kids wrestling around in the back of a hay wagon that's being pulled by a tractor down dark country roads? Mom always lectured my sisters about how they should never wear jewelry on a hayride, especially hoop earrings, because a young woman had once gotten her ear ripped off when her hoop earring got caught on a wagon. (To this day, I’m still not convinced that that ever really happened to anyone.)

My friends and I spent our Sundays in October playing in the leaves, coming up with ideas for the haunted house we were always going to build but never did, and trick-or-treating for UNICEF. As Halloween grew closer, the soaping started. It was mainly on the storefront windows on Main Street, and sometimes on certain people’s car windows or houses. It was common knowledge that Ivory or Dove brands worked the best, and if you really wanted to “get” someone, you used paraffin. I remember walking up and down the aisles of Mizera’s Market, my pockets jingling with the change that a half-dozen kids had pooled together, trying to build up the courage to purchase the soap and toilet paper from Mrs. Mizera.  I must admit it was worth every penny, because the TP did look really cool hanging from the tree limbs on a dark, windy Halloween night. 

Trick-or-treating in Raymond went on for two or three nights back then because you had to have time to go to everyone’s house in town. Not only did you stop at almost every house, but you were invited inside and stood there while they tried to guess who you were. And after they got done guessing they gave you FULL-SIZE candy bars, not the little miniatures that get handed out now. An added bonus was that it was not necessary for your parents to go through all your stuff to make sure it was safe.

Mrs. Blodgett, the widow who lived next door to the Ondreys', would dress up a like a witch and give out candy. We were scared to death of her all year round, but particularly on Halloween, and it would take us a while to work up the courage to actually ring her doorbell. (Of course our perceptions of her were entirely wrong, and we eventually learned that she was one of the nicest people ever.)

Many years later, Raymond started hosting an annual Halloween parade. While I didn’t have any luck finding a picture from Halloween from way back in the day, I did find this cute picture of Terry and Brenda Todt and their family, taken in 1994 at Raymond's Halloween parade.