trick and treats

It's getting pretty brisk out there, with the temp down to the single digits most days. This reminds me of Halloween when I was growing up in Calgary. It was usually cold around the end of October, with an early frost or some snow. We'd put on our winter jackets, put our plastic Woolco/K-Mart costumes on over that. With all the layers we looked like fat versions of our characters. We'd look like Fat He-Man, Fat GI Joe or Fat Pirate. It never occured to my brother or I to go out as Fat Albert.

Back in the 80s, most of the Halloween costumes you could buy were cheap plastic masks and coveralls. You could only get one night's use out of them. The fun fact is that when the temperature drops down enough, those plastic costumes and mask would break apart. That's how we knew we'd been out more than an hour: my Mer-Man mask would start to break apart and then I was just Kid in Winter Coat with Plastic Pieces Clinging To Me. My fantasy about filling a pillow case or a garbage bag would never come true, because those costumes would disintergrate at the stroke of 7pm.

Everyone has their own favourite candy or treat, the thing that would be your "Score" of the night. Usually it was house handing out chips or cans of pop. You always heard there was a house handing out full-sized candy, but I always thought that was an urban myth. Until I found the Hershey household.

For me, it was always mini O-Henry bars. My Dad always loved those rocket candies, my brother liked the Coffee Crisps, but I always liked the O-Henry's. We used to pool all the candy at the end of the night and split it, then end up trading with one another for our favourites. By the end, there was always that leftover pile of stuff nobody wanted, usually those rock-hard stale toffee candy wrapped in Halloween wrappers and Sun-Maid boxes of raisins that have congealed together. That's the stuff that would stay at the bottom of the Halloween Candy horde until the end of March.

Happy Halloween everyone, and try not to be the a-hole handing out raisins, toothbrushes and floss this year.