Halloween - is it just me?

[Former Member]

11 minutes ago, Thorn Wilde said:

...We've hijacked this thread about Halloween and made it about pizza.

Maybe it’ll help distract @Sasha Distan from his original complaint!  ;–)

[Sasha Distan]

3 hours ago, droughtquake said:

Maybe it’ll help distract @Sasha Distan from his original complaint!  ;–)

 

all pizza is good pizza. But especially thin crust pizza cooked in a woof fired oven in a converted van as made by our mate Andy. And eaten in the pub garden, accompanied by Dashi and the pub dogs.

In fact, I will go so far as to say that all other pizza is inferior to this pizza.

[Solivagant]

I grew up in a Roman Catholic household, so my parents always viewed Halloween as a pagan tradition. They used words such as "demonic" and "satanic" to describe it. I never really got to experience Halloween, but that didn't affect me much growing up since I was paranoid about strangers giving me candy: "What if they're poisoned?" "What if the caramel apples have blades inside of them?" I used to ask myself constantly. It would have been so much fun dressing up as my favorite cartoon characters, though.

[Former Member]

When my now-31-year-old nephew was very young, he wanted to dress up as Tinkerbell. His (maternal) grandfather bought him Pixie Dust and he kept trying to fly. His mother, who not only has a Gay brother-in-law (me!) but also has a Gay Uncle, decided she needed to convince him to dress up as Peter Pan instead. (I should mention that he did not inherit the orientation of his great-uncle and uncle.)

 

When I was young, my parents allowed us to Trick or Treat. My mother made us candy-filled easter baskets and christmas stockings. When we were young, she also signed christmas gifts as ‘Santa’. All this even though my father was a very conservative Protestant minister.  ;–)

Edited October 27, 2018 by Former Member

[Thorn Wilde]

Kids should be allowed to dress up as whatever they want for Halloween. I mean, within reason, some costumes are not child appropriate. But gender shouldn't matter. If a girl can wear it, a boy can wear it too, and vise versa. And young children almost always like sparkly things, regardless of which bits they were born with. Gendering costumes is just weird.

[Former Member]

I made a temporary, spice-free change just for @Sasha Distan!  ;–)

[Sasha Distan]

On 10/28/2018 at 3:44 AM, droughtquake said:

I made a temporary, spice-free change just for @Sasha Distan!  ;–)

 

*mwuh* thank you gorgeous.

[Former Member]

2 hours ago, Sasha Distan said:

*mwuh* thank you gorgeous.

But I’ve since changed it to encourage voting in the US, so you might not have seen the ‘spice-free’ version (or its ‘scary’ one-day reverse).  ;–)

[Glenn]

I'm 40 and we definitely did Hallowe'en when I was growing up in Ireland. I remember the excitement of seeing all the masks in the shop beside my primary school. Pumpkin jack o'lanterns weren't a thing back then, but we did see them in American media. I know there's an Irish tradition of carving turnip jack o'lanterns and I have a vague memory of aching hands from trying to carve one myself, but I couldn't swear to it. We also went trick or treating around neighbours houses, but I don't remember if we actually called it that.

 

My brother is keeping the old Irish Hallowe'en traditions alive with his kids. Trying to eat an apple that's hanging from a string with your hands behind your back, eating a grape from a mound of flour without getting any on you and so on. Ok, they're not great, but they're traditional!

[Daddydavek]

Children in the St. Louis area have been going trick-or-treating on Halloween at least since I was a kid growing up in the 1950's and they still do it.  We had about 60 trick-or-treaters come to our front door this year and we passed out bags of candy.  In recent years some neighborhoods or groups have been organizing trunk-or-treats at school or church yards usually on the Saturday evening before Halloween which have also become a big deal.  To participate with your trunk full of goodies, you have to be vetted and assigned a space on the parking lot.  Kids come freely or are dropped off by parents.  

[Thorn Wilde]

I wasn't home on Halloween this year, but there are a lot of kids in my neighbourhood, so some always come around. I rent the top floor of a house. The owners live downstairs, and have two kids. This year, they'd set up a jack-o-lantern outside, and lots of the neighbourhood kids came by, and when I got home from choir practice, I found a bloody handprint on the front door. They take Halloween very seriously. Also, their kids were adorable. The older one, a girl, was a zombie. Her little brother, who's 3, was a witch. He had the cutest purple hat.

[Valkyrie]

24 minutes ago, Thorn Wilde said:

I wasn't home on Halloween this year, but there are a lot of kids in my neighbourhood, so some always come around. I rent the top floor of a house. The owners live downstairs, and have two kids. This year, they'd set up a jack-o-lantern outside, and lots of the neighbourhood kids came by, and when I got home from choir practice, I found a bloody handprint on the front door. They take Halloween very seriously. Also, their kids were adorable. The older one, a girl, was a zombie. Her little brother, who's 3, was a witch. He had the cutest purple hat.

I lived in the upper apartment of a house for about ten years.  I had a real nice porch off my living room.  Halloween was a big deal on that street.  I had no idea how big the first year I lived there, so my one bag of candy was depleted pretty quickly.  The kids never rang the doorbell for the upper apartment, so I'd sit on my porch, in costume, and toss the candy down to the trick or treaters.  It was a lot of fun   I would also decorate my porch with corn stalks and carve jack o'lanterns.  

[Former Member]

When I was young, people weren’t as suspicious of everything as they are today. I really don’t think things have changed much except that bad news gets spread further and faster than it used to, first with satellites easing the sharing of news footage across the country in the ‘80s, then with social media today.

 

When I was a kid, hitchhiking transitioned from an easy way to get from place to place to a frightening thing where both drivers and passengers might be harmed. There were a few reports of razor blades in Halloween apples back then. Child kidnapping reports were usually very localized and you didn’t hear about them happening across the state, much less the country unless it involved a huge celebrity (like the Lindbergs or Gettys).

[Thorn Wilde]

38 minutes ago, Valkyrie said:

I lived in the upper apartment of a house for about ten years.  I had a real nice porch off my living room.  Halloween was a big deal on that street.  I had no idea how big the first year I lived there, so my one bag of candy was depleted pretty quickly.  The kids never rang the doorbell for the upper apartment, so I'd sit on my porch, in costume, and toss the candy down to the trick or treaters.  It was a lot of fun   I would also decorate my porch with corn stalks and carve jack o'lanterns.  

We usually ask the neighbours to send the kids our way, but as I said, I wasn’t at home, and we hadn’t had time to prepare anything. I like dressing up and scaring the crap out of the kids before giving them treats, though.  I’m good at scary make-up.

[Former Member]

16 minutes ago, Thorn Wilde said:

We usually ask the neighbours to send the kids our way, but as I said, I wasn’t at home, and we hadn’t had time to prepare anything. I like dressing up and scaring the crap out of the kids before giving them treats, though.  I’m good at scary make-up.

I don’t remember anyone giving out candy in costume back in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s…  ;–)

[TetRefine]

Halloween was big when I was growing up. We lived in a relatively quiet neighborhood where it was safe to walk the streets. Pretty much every house was giving out candy. As we got older, it turned more into a "lets be little shits" night where we would scare little kids, ding-dong-ditch people, and other (mostly) harmless stupid stuff. 

 

Halloween now as an adult is just an excuse to dress sexy/slutty and party. I was in Brooklyn this year and got to see Discodromo play all night. They spin some really great and upbeat techno. It was fun. 

[Thorn Wilde]

5 hours ago, droughtquake said:

I don’t remember anyone giving out candy in costume back in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s…  ;–)

 

Why should the kids get all the fun? When I was a kid no one even celebrated Halloween in Norway. I never got to go trick or treating. My turn to be spooky, I say! 

[Glenn]

Hallowe'en Update: After two years of no trick-or-treaters, we got a knock on the door on Hallowe'en night. Only one group the whole night, but it was Sandy and a Pink Lady, so points for effort! And I got to eat the leftover bags of Malteasers and Skittles so I'm not complaining.

[Page Scrawler]

On 10/26/2018 at 12:33 AM, Solivagant said:

I was paranoid about strangers giving me candy: "What if they're poisoned?" "What if the caramel apples have blades inside of them?

That thing about poisoned candy is an urban myth. There are instances where kids have died or gotten sick, only for doctors to later determine that outside factors were involved, thus not true "Halloween poisonings".

[Former Member]

1 hour ago, Page Scrawler said:

That thing about poisoned candy is an urban myth. There are instances where kids have died or gotten sick, only for doctors to later determine that outside factors were involved, thus not true "Halloween poisonings".

You were researching the poisoned candy myth for more than three months?  ;–)