Halloween when you were a kid: fun, not fun, never did it, etc ?

[TlalocW]

22. Lived in a small farming town

We walked around by ourselves (age 6). This was the late 70s/early 80s. Random memories.

1. Costumes were the ones sold in boxes with the plastic window that showed the mask that you could barely see out of with the rubber band that would break after 3 houses. Our eyesight was so bad in them that we trick-or-treated at a house, walked back to the sidewalk, walked a ways then trick-or-treated at the same house at a different door (it was a big house).
2. We would literally hit at least 50% of the town.
3. I remember a neighbor across the street answering the door in a scary costume, holding a realistic stuffed snake and trying to scare us when he opened the door. We all went, "Trick-or-treat, Mister Tjaden!" and I saw his shoulders slump in disappointment.
4. One year the town tried to have Trick-or-Treating on the weekend before Halloween so some of us went out, and all the houses we hit, the adults were confused but still gave us some candy. So we went out again on actual Halloween.
5. There was a tree right at the edge of a neighbor's yard close to the street with a really weak, discolored street light next to it. It was a couple houses down from mine. I always experienced dread walking by it in the dark especially on Halloween. Some of the other kids said so as well.
6. Was Batman like four years in a row. Made it easy on Mom who would either save the costume or go buy a new one (the kind mentioned in number 1) at KMart.
7. Music teacher would play Halloween songs. I wish I knew what record she had.
8. In high school, friends and I would go to the nearby big city or out into the country to go to Haunted Houses. We met at a church and piled into two cars - boys in mine, girls in another - to go. We got back to the church before the girls, and I decided we should hide my car and then hide around all the other cars telling the boys to jump out when one of the girls inevitably said something about beating the boys back. We did so perfectly timed.
9. My dad semi-retired during my high school years and would sell produce he either grew or got from a cousin, including pumpkins. Every evening, it was my job to load the pumpkins on the trailer and take them into the backyard and then move them back to the front the next morning. On Halloween, I asked my dad if he wanted me to move the remaining unsold ones (about a dozen and a half) as it was getting dark. He said no. I was kind of confused until that morning at 3 am. We lived on about an acre of land, and our driveway went into the backyard and did a half circle that led to the attached garage. In other words, our garage doors faced the backyard. I was a paperboy and would deliver them at around 3 in the morning on a little mo-ped. I came around the house to see the front yard completely empty of pumpkins, but then I saw their remnants smashed all along the street, other people's driveways, and even one thrown through the windshield of a car. Dad knew we couldn't sell them, and letting them get stolen was the easiest way to get rid of them.

Also the razor blades/poison in candy is pretty much an urban legend. There was one case (in 1974) of a father placing poison-infused Pixie Sticks in his son's Halloween candy (as well as in some of his cousins' to make it look like there was a mad poisoner) so he could collect on an insurance policy he had on his son. The son did die (the cousins fortunately did not eat their Pixie Stix), and the dad was arrested. Another kid got into his uncle's heroin stash, and his parents sprinkled heroin over the kid's candy to make it look the candy was the culprit. There have been several other instances of kids getting sick/dying where Halloween candy was initially blamed but was ultimately shown not to be the cause.

The stories got a lot of help sticking around during the Satanic Panic of the 70s/80s (D&D was a gateway to hell, backward masking in records, etc) thank to certain preachers and religious nuts who hated Halloween, especially Jack T. Chick of Chick Tract fame, who put out tract about how Satanists attempting to curry favor with the Devil were behind the poisonings.

Here are a couple guys who do humorous "theatrical" readings of Chick Tracts tackling that particular one.

TlalocW