Trick or Treat

Please enjoy tonight's encore presentation of  the Throwback Thursday post, Trick or Treat, originally published in October, 2014.  

Earlier this week, I was telling my son tales about the real Halloween, the one that took place back home in Raymond. It was the good old days, back before there were Halloween superstores and easy access to all kinds of fancy costumes and decor. We had basically 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 the back porch closet. About a week before Halloween, Dad would climb up a small ladder and get the box full of treasures down for us. It was full of old masks and various props, and with some creativity, imagination, and plenty of mom’s Avon red lipstick, it was possible to reinvent yourself year after year.

Terry and Brenda Todt and family at the
Raymond Halloween parade in 1994.

 The masks were old and uncomfortable. They were manufactured out of hard plastic and you could barely breathe, let alone see where you were going. Your mask was secured to your head with a tight, thin elastic band that got tangled in your hair and usually ended up snapping you in the face a few times over the course of the evening. The “costumes” were often regular clothes that were too big or worn out, but with ingenuity it was possible to fashion a decent costume. In fact, that was half of the fun of the whole thing. 

The days leading up to Halloween were exciting. You selected the perfect pumpkin(s), carved them, and stocked up on votive 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 behind a hay trail on the streets. My mom worried that hayrides were too dangerous, but I thought they were great fun. What could possibly go wrong with fifty unruly kids wrestling around in the back of a hay wagon that was being pulled by a tractor down a dark country road? Mom always lectured my sisters about how they should never wear jewelry on a hayride, especially hoop earrings, because so and so nearly had her ear ripped off when her hoop earring got caught on a wagon. I think that was a Raymond urban legend, and to this day I’m still not convinced that ever really happened to anyone. 

My friends and I spent Sundays in October raking leaves into huge piles and jumping in them, 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 heavy with the change that a half-dozen kids had pooled together, trying to get up the nerve to go up to the cash register to purchase the soap and toilet paper. In the end it was all worth it to see the TP hanging from the bare tree limbs on a dark, windy Halloween night. 

Trick-or-Treating in Raymond went on for two or three nights because you had to have time to go to almost every house in town, where you would be invited inside and subjected to a barrage of questions while the family who lived their tried to guess who you were. Once they were done guessing and the masks came off, they gave you FULL-SIZE candy bars, not the little miniatures that are handed out now. And although there were the stories from big cities where glass or razor blades were found in candy, in Raymond, it was not necessary for your parents to go through all your stuff to make sure it was safe. Of course it was safe. 

Each year, Mrs. Blodgett, the widow who lived next door to the Ondrey’s, would dress up as a witch and hand out candy to everyone. We were scared to death of her year round, but particularly on Halloween, and I remember huddling together in her front yard, trying to work up the courage to ring her doorbell. (Of course, we eventually learned that our perceptions of her were entirely wrong, and she was one of the nicest people in town.)

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 my day, I did find this cute picture of Terry and Brenda Todt and their family, taken in 1994 at Raymond's Halloween parade.