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It doesn’t seem to matter how old I get; I still love Halloween. It’s almost as much fun giving out candy as it was “doing the rounds” to beg for it as a child. I adore seeing all the costumes, and I get a kick out of being that one uber-popular person on the block who gives out full-size chocolate bars. (Every year, there’s at least one kid who runs back home, puts on a different costume, and tries to bluff me out of a second Snickers.) But I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about how the holiday has changed, and honestly, I’m not sure whether it used to be better or worse.
Okay, so when I was a kid, you went trick-or-treating just once a year, after dark on Halloween night, whether it was pouring down rain or not. In addition to possible pneumonia, you generally scored a great big bag of stuff, which if you were lucky would include some really good candy (read: something that wasn’t candy-corn or hard peppermints), homemade cookies, maybe a caramel apple or popcorn balls, and there was always that one spoilsport who handed out toothpaste. The usual decorations included jack-o-lanterns, cardboard skeletons, rubber spiders, black and orange crepe paper, and – for the toothpaste guy – long streamers of toilet paper hanging from every tree, courtesy of some very irritated trick-or-treaters.
These days, the trick-or-treat outings start as much as a week before October 31, at malls and other dull public locations. So, more candy, but less spookiness. Also, I can’t help feeling like it devalues the actual holiday. On Halloween itself, kids head out before the sun is even down, and often head home right after dark. So, a bit easier on parents’ nerves, but again, not nearly as spooky. Everything you score while trick-or-treating is mass-market, pre-wrapped, and child-safe, and some of it is probably little plastic toys instead of tasty, sugar-laden candy. I’m even willing to predict that every neighborhood still has one guy who hands out toothpaste. As far as I’m concerned, this is the big drawback of modern Halloween: no really excellent treats. Being a responsible adult, I do what I can to make up for it with the full-size candy bars, but if the world hadn’t gone all paranoid in the past 30 years, I’d be the one handing out fresh Rice Krispy treats with extra gooey marshmallow.
Now, with that said… there is one way in which the 21st century Halloween beats every previous version of the holiday hands-down, and that is in decorations. Not just wow, but wow. I went shopping for a few costume accessories last weekend, and walked out of the all-Halloween store with two huge bags of décor and a massive grin on my face. Forget the cardboard skeletons; I have a shrunken pirate head that laughs when you get too close! I have bloody handprints made of red gel that stick to my window and peel right off after Halloween. I have strings of lights shaped like eerie green ghosts. I have a can of spray-on spiderwebs. (How cool is that? Spiderwebs! In a can!) And I have a whole bunch of other stuff for dressing up my porch and the front room, all of which is about a thousand times more awesome than crepe paper and ghosts made of starched sheets.
I am still a traditionalist when it comes to jack-o-lanterns, though. No plastic pumpkins or glow-sticks for me. My hand-carved masterpiece, complete with lopsided grin and triangle-shaped nose, will be illuminated by an honest-to-gosh, fire-hazard candle, because that’s what jack-o-lanterns are all about.
And yes, I’ll be handing out candy bars again. And wishing they were Rice Krispy treats.
Hey, Moxie, what about the games?
Oh, right! I guess I got a little carried away. It’s just not a proper Coffee Break without a few games. If you’re looking for Halloween-themed versions of our usual favorites, we’ve got you covered:
Halloween Bejeweled
Halloween Jigsaw
Scary Movies Trivia
And if you’re looking for something that’s just plain spooky and a great way to get in the Halloween mood, I highly recommend Mystery Case Files: Ravenhearst. It’s a hidden-object game set in a haunted, creepy, cluttered, creepy, run-down, creepy mansion, and if it doesn’t make you nervously look over your shoulder every once in a while, then you’re obviously not playing in the dark with the sound turned up.
Which you should be. Trust me.
Because I couldn’t resist…
What’s Halloween without cute kids in cute costumes? I thought I’d share pictures of a couple of our departmental offspring in their holiday finery! As a diehard gamer, I got a huge kick out of the fact that one of them dressed as Link from Legend of Zelda, and the other one dressed as a fairy. It’s an Ocarina of Time-ish coincidence!
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| That’s Aidan on the left, by the way, and Sylvana on the right.
Toasted Punkin Seeds!
Halloween means jack-o-lanterns, and jack-o-lanterns mean scooping the goo out of a pumpkin before carving it up. But don’t throw those seeds away! Do yourself a favor and paw through the goo for every last, delicious seed, and then use them in my mum’s Toasted Punkin Seed recipe!
What you’ll need:
3 cups de-goo’ed but unwashed pumpkin seeds
2.5 tbsp melted butter
2 tsp salt
.75 tsp Worcestershire sauce (really, this is enough)
Mix all the ingredients together and spread the seeds (now sticky and slippery at the same time, if you can believe it) out into one thin layer on a cookie sheet. Preheat your oven to 250 degrees, then bake the seeds for approximately one hour, stirring every 15 minutes until they’re crisp, dry, and golden.
This is one of the recipes I brought from home when I moved into my first apartment, more than 20 years ago. (I still have the index card I wrote it down on!) I make a batch of these seeds every Halloween, and often again at Thanksgiving. I hope you like them! | |
