I just posted a photo for the 31 Shots of Halloween challenge that I’m participating in on Instagram, and I felt inspired to share the story of what can only be described as the worst Halloween of my childhood.
This picture was taken today in the rain, reminding me of the one and only rainy Halloween I ever endured in my childhood, when I was six years old.
Halloween fell on a Sunday that year, and this was only going to be my third year of actually trick-or-treating. My mother, forever old-fashioned, questioned if Halloween should even be celebrated on a Sunday (Seriously, where did I come from?!), but, at least in the area that I grew up, it was.
I had picked out my costume at the beginning of the month, from the biggest Halloween store that seemed to exist at the time, Party City. I chose a Dalmatian, and I distinctly remember being put out that they didn’t have the actual, licensed 101 Dalmatians costume in my size. I had to settle for dressing up as a generic Dalmatian puppy, but this costume would actually go on to become my most worn costume ever. It was comfy and made of pajama-like material, and I would often put it on to “prank” my relatives that somehow my Aunt Trish’s actual pet Dalmatian at the time had gotten into the house. I believe I was about eleven the last time I put the costume on, and it barely covered my knees, with the tail sitting about halfway up my spine. But I digress.
The year I was six, I was very sick. During that October, I had missed about a week and a half of school due to an unexplainable fever that simply refused to break. I was about two days away from hospitalization when I suddenly sat bolt upright in my father’s recliner, which I’d been sleeping on, complimented the dress that some woman on TV was wearing, and magically became myself again. I went back to school, and, of course, anticipated Halloween. We had our class party on the 29th, due to Halloween falling on Sunday, and made corn cob witches and had a costume contest, which was won by the girl with the handmade genie costume that we thought was oh-so fancy because she actually had to go into the bathroom to change rather than just put her costume on over her clothes like the rest of us. A couple of kids were confused as to why my Dalmatian nose sat on my head rather than coming down over my own nose, but it was more of a hat than a mask. We also did a little parade around some of the nearby classrooms, during which I remember a boy who’d been in my kindergarten class the year before pointing at me from his desk and saying, loudly, “Katie’s a dog?!” First grade definitely wasn’t my best year, but I was having a blast, and I loved the idea of basically having two Halloweens, the class party and the actual night of trick-or-treating still to come.
But, when Sunday, October 31st, 1993 finally rolled around (PS, I’m just now realizing how historically inaccurate Hocus Pocus is, because Halloween 1993 definitely fell on a school day in the movie!) I got a nasty surprise: It was raining nonstop!
I’m not sure if a rainy Halloween would’ve been as big of a deal if I hadn’t just been bordering on deathly ill, but my mother was very nervous to let me go outside for an extended period of time in chilly, wet weather. Of course, I begged and begged. This wasn’t just any random event. This was Halloween, and I’d been waiting a whole year for it! After much deliberation between my mother, my father, and Aunt Trish, it was finally decided that I would be allowed to trick-or-treat, but only while it was still daylight, and my mother would follow along with the car, so that I wouldn’t be outside in the rain for any very long intervals.
I wasn’t thrilled, but I took the deal. Trick-or-treating by car in broad daylight was still better than not trick-or-treating at all.
And so we set off, starting in our own immediate neighborhood. At the end of my street, there was a house with many stairs, and, because they were slippery with rainwater, I fell down several of them. I was fine, but vowed to avoid houses with stairs like that in the future and this was a trick-or-treating tradition I stuck with until I was much, much older.
The strangest thing that happened on that Halloween afternoon, though, happened just a few houses down from that one, on the adjoining street. I knocked on the door, said “Trick or treat!”, and the man who answered seemed nervous and almost looked surprised to see me. I know people probably don’t expect many trick-or-treaters when it’s still light out, but come on. It’s Halloween all day long and you have to expect a few stragglers, right? But then he said he was “out of candy”, which seems highly unlikely around maybe 2PM when there was clearly no one else out yet in the neighborhood. He told me not to go away, though, and went inside for a bit, while my mother and aunt stared baffled from the car, and then he finally came back with an apple. I took it and said thank you, though I was still a little weirded out, and when I got back into the car, my mother promptly took the apple and tossed it, saying it wasn’t safe to eat anything unwrapped. It’s probably more likely that this family was of another nationality and didn’t fully understand the traditions of Halloween, or maybe just weren’t ready for trick-or-treaters, but to this day I can’t help but wonder if I was almost a victim of the classic razor-blade-in-apple legend.
The final straw that afternoon came when we ventured a little farther out, around the area where my aunt would usually take me on Halloween night. A few more trick-or treaters were out now, and I basically demanded to go to this really heavily decorated house, even though it meant my mother having to park the car on the main road. Aunt Trish went with me to the door, since it was around the side of the house, out of view of the car, and a little crowd was starting to form. When we got up to the door, the man handing out candy was dressed in a full-blown Freddy Krueger costume and scared the life out of me! I didn’t understand the connection of horror to Halloween at the time, or the concept of home haunts, etc., and my six-year-old brain just couldn’t handle it. I remember just running back to the car, then driving to a nearby parking lot to calm down, and then I’m pretty sure that was it for the day. I actually have no memory of anything beyond that that day, but I do know that from then on, the idea of rain on Halloween made me cringe.
That year, though, turned out to be the only year that it rained on Halloween in my childhood. I would go on to see things like a freak blizzard and Hurricane Sandy in my adult years, and we’ve barely seen precipitation-less Halloweens since those things happened, but at least there was never a debacle quite like Halloween 1993 again. I’m just glad it didn’t make me lose hope.
If anyone else has a “worst Halloween” story they’d like to share, I’d love to hear it!
Stay spooky, my friends.
Comments
Post a Comment