Apple Annie’s WeblogLOLtober 2024
Spooky season, huh? Everyone is wild for spooky season. Well, maybe not everyone. I wonder what childhood experiences influenced your feelings about spooky season. Was it exposure to a yearly ritual? Was it lack of access to the spooky fun times? Did your family not allow participation? Perhaps financial circumstances played a part? Did you grow up on a street where hoards of trick-or-treaters came every year? Maybe your childhood experiences are not even in play, perhaps it is your experience as an adult with kids that now forms your affinity?
LOLtober, as explained by Adam of omg.lol, is a challenge to write a single post about a special Halloween or "spooky season" memory. That's it!
Simple enough, right? But considering all the questions I asked in the first paragraph, perhaps that's complicated for you. It is a little complicated for me, so in this post I'm going to recount as much of spooky season from my life that I can. Nope, it won't be that long, I promise.
I grew up on a semi-rural county road with only five other houses. That a) meant that options to trick-or-treat on my own street didn't exist, and b) meant we had close to zero trick-or-treaters come to our home. I had friends in town and in other nearby subdivisions that had more opportunities for the spooky season experience. During elementary school this was often the solution and we'd go wild with our costumes, getting together at a friend's house and doing ourselves up.
One year we got really fancy and we paid to rent costumes from a costume place. Each of us became a princess. Now please recall that I am old (sort of...) and there wasn't the dearth of Disney costume crap there is today. Of course, there were some available, but it was nothing like today. Also, my parents were not into the "buy one costume for use once and then throw it away" mindset. So many years my mom, a sewer and quilter, made my costume. The year we rented costumes was pretty dang special.
Once I was old enough to drive and get in trouble, there was none of that anymore. Spooky season became about house parties. I don't even think costumes were a thing anymore. If they were, the barest minimum effort was acceptable. If you even remotely looked like you put something on that was not your regular garb, it passed. This was squarely situated in the grunge era of the 1990s, so it was not hard to pass as a costume if I wasn't wearing a flannel shirt, torn baggy jeans, or a monster sized sweater, flight jacket, and Doc Martens.
There was also a period of time in college where going to corn mazes and haunted houses became a big deal. But I think the biggest deal was going to a spooky laser light show at OMSI. Of course, as a young misfit, there were probably mind-altering substances involved. Portland also has a very nearby agricultural influence so you can go and spend a day or weekend wandering amazing farms, fields, harvest festivals, and of course mazes, on Sauvie Island or other areas.
Now as a homeowner, I do not have kids, I am in a dense residential neighborhood a stone's throw from an elementary school, middle school, and high school. But we just don't get the dense trick-or-treater crowds like some neighborhoods. I think this is due to my neighborhood being boxed in by large thoroughfares like SE Division and SE Powell. It just isn't safe for packs of kids to be crossing those roads. Instead nearby SE neighborhoods like Sellwood-Moreland get some very heavy traffic from trick-or-treaters.
This actually suits me fine. The first few years I stocked up on candy and set up shop by the front door, but nowadays I'm either not here (purposefully) or I turn the porch light off. Bah, humbug! It just became not worth it to have so much candy when a steady season was not reliable. So I'd either have way too much candy leftover or run out very early.
So there you have it. See? Not very long at all. I just summed up nearly 50 years of spooky season in under 1,000 words. I hope you have the spooky season of your dreams this year, whether that be candy-filled and screamsational or a quiet night cuddled in front of the television. Have fun and be safe 🎃
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