Halloween 2020: Trick or treat or …?

It’s hard to imagine what Halloween celebrations will be like this year. Will there be clusters of costumed kids at the doorstep calling out “trick or treat” from under their masks? Instead of the usual masks of princesses, animals, and superheroes, will this year’s masks be nose and mouth coverings to contain germs from possible coronavirus superspreaders? Will parents regard every package of candy as being a possible COVID carrier, the wrapper on each piece needing to be washed or wiped down?

If you are looking for a socially- distanced haunted Halloween activity, you might want to check out The Horrorland, a nighttime drive-thru haunted Halloween experience being held October 1 – 31 in Miramar. We haven’t tested the fear factor, but according to their website, it is not recommended for children under 13. For more information, go to https://thehorrorland.com.

While we can’t quite predict what Halloween will be like in the present or the future, we can tell you something about its past…

Halloween history highlights

The origin of Halloween is often credited to the Celts, who lived in what is now the general area of Ireland, the United Kingdom, and northern France about 2,000 years ago. On October 31st, they celebrated the festival of Samhain, (pronounced sow-win) which marked the end of the harvest and the start of winter and a new year. Celts believed that the worlds of the living and the dead came close together at this time and that they could connect with spirits and ghosts of their ancestors.

While some spirits were thought to cause mayhem, others were thought to help see into the future. On Samhain, Celts feasted, made lanterns from hollowed-out gourds, told fortunes, built bonfires, and chose which animals would need to be slaughtered for the winter.

When Christianity reached the Celtic areas, the pagan rituals were strongly discouraged. The church recognized November 2nd as All Souls’ Day — a day to honor the dead — and November 1st as All Saints’ Day, also called All-Hallows (hallows meaning saints or holy people). Thus, October 31st was All-Hallows Eve (now known as Halloween), but the light-hearted celebrations with trick or treating, decorations, and parties we know today only evolved in the United States and Canada over time.

Colonists in New England, with their strict religious practices, did not embrace Halloween celebrations; southern colonies were more likely to celebrate by telling fortunes, sharing tales of the dead, dancing, and singing.

When Irish and Scottish immigrants came to the United States in great numbers during the second half of the 1800s, they brought their Halloween traditions with them, including community parties with games and costumes. One of the traditions that was popular around the turn of the 19th century and now long gone, was Halloween being a time for a young, unmarried woman, to foretell her future spouse. She would throw an apple peel over her shoulder, believing it would land in the shape of the first initial of her future husband, or that by looking in the mirror Halloween night, she would see an image of the man she would wed.

Halloween is big business today

  • Guess who?

According to estimates from the National Retail Federation last fall, the greatest share of the nearly $9 billion that was expected to be spent
on Halloween in 2019, was for costumes, at $3.2 billion. The newest trend? Pet costumes. Pet costumes have surged in popularity; nearly twenty percent of pet owners planned to put their pets

in costumes last year—pumpkins, hot dogs, and superheroes being among the most popular—at a cost of nearly $500 million.

  • It’s beginning to look a lot like…Halloween.

Decorating for Halloween inside and especially outside has become more elaborate with high-tech holograms, decorative lights, and giant blow-ups gaining popularity in recent years, resulting in consumers spending $2.7 billion on Halloween decorations. (2019 estimate)

  • Trick or treat, give me something good to eat.

While there was trick or treating in the 1930s and 40s, with kids going house to house to get cookies, cakes, fruit, nuts, and coins, it wasn’t until the 1950s that candy became the common hand-out. Last year’s estimate was there would be $2.6 billion spent on Halloween candy.

In 2019, candystore.com reported that between 2007-2018, the top candies sold for Halloween were: Skittles, Reese’s Cups, M&M’s, Snickers, and Starburst, followed by the candy most associated with Halloween: candy corn.

Those sweet yellow, orange, and white kernels were invented in the 1880s in Philadelphia and gained widespread popularity at the turn of the 20th century. Candy corn is made from sugar, fondant, corn syrup, vanilla flavor, and marshmallow crème melted into a liquid, colored, and molded to create the kernel shape. The vast majority of candy corn is made for Halloween, with approximately 35 million pounds of candy corn produced each year, a whopping 9 billion pieces.

And if the spirit moves you, and you want to celebrate Halloween a little early, October 30th is National Candy Corn Day.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

By Ellen Marsden

PRANK YOU VERY MUCH: ON BEYOND TP-ING

PRANK YOU VERY MUCH: ON BEYOND TP-ING

by Cynthia MacGregor

What does Halloween mean to you? To little kids (and a few bigger ones), anticipating a haul of goodies, the holiday means a chance to dress up in costume, get out and ring doorbells, and see what kind of sweets they can fill up their goody bags with. To teenagers, celebrating Halloween often means binge-watching the scariest movies they can find. And adults, if they’re not staying home handing out candy, might opt for attending a costume party, or hosting one of their own.

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Ah, but then there are the pranksters—primarily kids and teens, although there are some adults like “Amazing Grace” (as she asked to be identified) of West Palm Beach, an inveterate prankster, for whom Halloween is a wonderful opportunity to pull a few good ones on unsuspecting friends.

Amazing Grace seems to be in the minority, however. Two requests for descriptions of Halloween pranks, one in the form of a mass emailing to almost 80 local residents, and the other a notice in a newsletter called HARO (“Help A Reporter Out”), failed to turn up anyone in the Tri-County area who recalled ever pulling a Halloween prank or having one pulled on them—either in their childhood or their adult years.

Fortunately, howeveraddams021, questioning people who hadn’t received the mailings and don’t read HARO resulted in two positive responses—from Amazing Grace and from Grant Houser of Palm Springs.

Amazing Grace says she has a 6’ 2” butler statue that she calls “Uncle Fester.” The eyeballs shift and move, and the chest goes in and out, but only when activated by a clap of her hands. She brings “Uncle Fester” out of storage every Halloween and, when people come over, they are surprised to see the “butler” standing there. They are even more surprised when, at the clap of her hand, “Uncle Fester” starts breathing (chest moving), his eyeballs roll…and he talks. “Huh – huh –huh – hello,” he says. “How may I serve you?” And then, “The master will serve you now.”

Also clap-activated is a “spiritual ball” that, when Amazing Grace claps, lights up, displaying a face inside. This bit of trickery also has a voice. It says, “Good evening. How are you? Are you looking for guidance? Ho ho ho. Go to the nearest store and find it.”

Finally, this inveterate trickster has a fake phone that she can cause to ring on command. She’ll ask the person who’s about to be her prank victim, “Can you please answer that?” and, when they do, a spooky voice emanates from the receiver, saying, “Come with me to the grave. I know what you’re doing.”

Grant’s two pranks, both memories from his childhood, were far tamer by comparison. One was the evergreen prank known variously as “ring and run,” or “ding-dong ditch,” in which the prankster rings someone’s doorbell, then quickly runs out of sight. When the home’s occupants come to the door with a bowlful of candy, expecting to dole some out to costumed trick-or-treaters, there is no one there.

His other remembered prank, though, required a little more ingenuity—and the aid of his stepfather. Grant’s stepdad would take all the thread off a thread spool, then notch the spool all over with a workshop tool. They would approach a home and stealthily go to the window. They would run the notched spool down the windowpane, which made a “terrible, awful, raucous noise” that brought the home’s occupants rushing to the window to see what the cause of that horrible sound was. The residents usually arrived with so much haste that Grant and his stepdad would not have time to make a clean getaway, as Grant did with ring and run, and they wound up face to face with the prank’s victims. But as no harm had been done, there were fortunately no repercussions.