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

[hunter]

46. We did not celebrate Halloween when my mom was a Jehovah's Witness.

She eventually got booted out of the religion because she couldn't stay out of politics. Soon after she decided it *might* be okay to celebrate Halloween. The first year I was too nervous to go out so I stayed home and handed out candy.

I remember two traditional Halloweens where I was running around freely with friends, not having fits of autistic spectrum anxiety, but that was after I'd returned younger siblings home from their rounds, which seemed to me a huge responsibility. Then we moved overseas where they didn't celebrate Halloween, but they had huge bonfires which were way better, especially with everyone running around drunk and I was just starting to think sex might be fun, but I was far too timid to pursue it.

Our family returned to the U.S.A. and I quit high school for college. I hated high school.

In college I tried to celebrate Halloween twice, but there was some really bad shit going on in my life then. I didn't drink or do drugs because I didn't need them to go tripping. (My brain went a little sideways in adolescence...) I'd have bad weeks where hallucinations were constant companions. The first college Halloween I chose to celebrate someone ended up taking me back to an apartment I shared with some other guys and told me to stay there. I took off my costume and went off to the computer lab, which is mostly where I lived then. Less than a month later my girlfriend's girlfriend tried to kill herself, I got in a fight with a teaching assistant, etc., and it was strongly "suggested" I take a break from school, which I did. I'm still haunted by all that.

The next college Halloween I'll not talk about except to say you shouldn't dress up as a dangerous and notorious psycho when you are a mentally ill person yourself, even if you are mostly harmless. Someone will call the police. That was my last wild Halloween.

I did manage to get my head together and graduate from college.

My wife and I still live in the same neighborhood we raised our children in. Our children have moved off to big cities but many of their classmates have stayed and are now bringing their own children around trick-or-treating. They remark how they remember coming to our house when they were children themselves. We still have many of the same decorations, scary music, etc., only the dogs have changed.