HALLOWEEN: What happened?!

Hope everyone had a great Halloween. Halloween at our house was pretty quiet; we only had 10 trick-o-treater's. Whats up with that? Where did they all go? Doesn't seem like the halloweens of years gone by.

When I was a kid, and that was a long time ago, we would hit as many houses as we could, go home, unload all they we got, save what we liked, then put the candy we didn't like in the candy bowl to be handed back out. (I wonder how much candy was recycled that way by all the kids.)

We did not have one of them plastic pumpkins for putting our candy in. We used a big paper grocery bag. That way we didn't have to go home all that often to unload. We would hit street after street, house after house, and compare notes with others to see who was giving out the best candy. Then we would hit that house more than once. We would go there about every 45 minutes or so. Seemed like they never caught on or asked questions, and we hardly ever had to do a trick.

Course there was always this one old guy and his wife. She was really sweet, and he always came across as a grouch. You know, holler if you set foot in his yard or cut the corner on your bike when you crossed his yard. She gave out the best stuff.

One year she gave out homemade cookies. (God help you if you do that now!) Another year she gave out candied apples. (Again, God help you if you did that now.) Then after the scare about razor blades in apples she gave out chocolate. LOTS of chocolate. She didn't just give you one piece, she gave it out by the handful. Course thinking about it now, she had pretty small hands.

If it snowed you would really have to watch your grocery bag. Drag it along as the snow piled up along the sidewalk, and you left a trail of candy behind you. Then the big kids would just walk behind you and pick up whatever fell from your bag. I always wanted to wrap up some ExLax and let it fall from my bag for the big kids.

But after I got a bit older, I was one of those big kids, following the littler ones to see what fell from thier wet grocery bags. I sure am glad that I didn't follow through with the ExLax thing. After a few years, you know how some ideas come back and bite you in the butt. (No pun intended.) That would of been one of them.

I heard the other night on the news that we have had snow on only 10 Halloweens over the years. I think they are wrong. It seemed like it always snowed just before, or on, Halloween night. I think their records are off or something.

And what happened to people decorating their houses? Seemed like everyone had some sort of stuff up for Halloween. There was an over abundance of Jack-o-lanterns all over the place. You knew because you would see about half of them in the street the next morning, and the other half were in the trash by the end of the week. Or you could ride your bike around the neighborhood a few days after Halloween and you could smell the pumpkin pies baking.

Yep, kids now days just don't know what they are missing. Running from house to house, running from the big kids who want your candy, playing pranks on friends and family, having the adults scare the crap out of you. (Ever have your Dad jump out of a bush in your front yard at you?!) Just being with your friends and going from house to house, and everyone really did look out for your well being.

How about some of them haunted houses we used to go to? I remember the Campus Life kids used to put on a real mean haunted house. I had the ripped t-shirt and scratches to prove it.

Yep, Halloween sure has changed. Too bad that things are the way they are now days. But I'm sure that the kids have just as much fun as we did. Things do seem to be much safer now also. They have malls and such to go to. And I have thought about this a great deal. . . they get a lot more candy now. How many stores are there at the mall -- like about 100 or so? Man, that's a lot of candy.

So I hope that maybe your Halloween was on the quiet side. Nothing wrong with that, I guess. But it would be nice to have a good scare once in a while, don't you think?

Now I have to figure out how to get through all of this candy, with out expanding the Isle of Belly. (That's a scary story in itself.)