Halloween then

My mother and I were talking about what Halloween was like when I was a kid. In Huntsville, the schools had a big Halloween Carnival that served as the major fund-raiser for most of the school organizations for the year, and that largely took the place of the whole trick-or-treating thing for us. I think I recall going to one or two houses to be paraded around in our costumes, but the major thing was the classroom Halloween party and the carnival that night. You got to wear your costume there, too.

 

The carnival began with a chicken-and-spaghetti dinner served in the high school cafeteria. Why this was supposed to be a treat, I am not sure. It was something easy and relatively inexpensive to make in bulk, serve quickly to a lot of kids anxious to get dinner out of the way and on to the booths and games, and it gave the parents -- read, mother, this being those days -- an excuse not to cook dinner at home in a rush while the kids were squirming to get on the road. When I was in elementary school and junior high, it was exciting even to eat in the high school cafeteria.

There were the usual booths: a game where you pretended to fish while a parent behind a sheet stuck a bag onto the clothespin on your fishing line, a fortune teller (who assured me I would be a scientist), games where you could win toys worth a nickel or a dime, a booth that sold -- wonder of wonders! -- used comic books for a nickel, a talent show, popcorn balls, candy and on and on and on. It was a lot of fun, as I recall, and I only missed trick-or-treating when I would see it on television or read about it in a book. For me, Halloween was chicken-and-spaghetti and used Superman comic books. And I liked it that way, too.