It wasn’t until I had children that I realized how much the world had changed since I was a child myself. Before I had kids I had no reason to keep up with how much things had changed. I don’t think it really hit me until I began taking my kids to school and was able to directly compare their experiences with my own.
The way kids celebrate holidays in public schools is so different than what I experienced as a kid. There are reasons for that and while some of the changes are for the better, that doesn’t keep me from cherishing my memories. It’s a bit like longing for the old days of mom and pop video rental stores while living in a world where I have access to tens of thousands of movies and television shows that I can watch on my phone while away from my home.
Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. A big part of that was celebrating Halloween with my friends at school.
In grade school back in the 1980s, kids were encouraged to wear their costumes to school. I was a bus rider, so imagine that image — fifty kids in Halloween costumes, all riding on a school bus. Little ghosts, vampires, and monsters with school books in their laps.
I don’t remember if there were rules regarding our costumes, but thinking back there probably were. In younger grades, there was a pretty even split between homemade costumes and those plastic Ben Cooper costumes. While many kids brought masks, I think they were put away during lessons. There were always a few kids who came to school with their faces painted, and that was an all-day commitment.
My biggest memory of Halloween in grade school was the “parade”. At some point in the day, all the students in our class put on our masks, lined up in single file, and visited all the other classrooms. Our school was relatively small — there were two sixth grade classrooms, two fifth grade rooms, and so on. We visited each room and stood side by side in front of the chalkboard for all the kids to see. After our parade ended, every other classroom did the same and walked through every classroom, including ours. Suffice it to say, we didn’t get a lot of schoolwork done that day.
What were costumes like? Not much different than today, I think. We always had the classics — Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman, and some poor child who thought wrapping himself in toilet paper and coming as a mummy was a good idea. Then there were all the pop-culture costumes. Some were store bought — kids dressed as Casper and Popeye and Darth Vader — mixed with a few Madonnas and Michael Jacksons. Then were would be a few original ones. My friend Chris once came dressed as Jaws. My buddies and I once dressed up as the Three Stooges, an odd choice in the 1980s.
In the afternoon we always had a Halloween party. One thing that’s changed is that today, kids (and parents) aren’t allowed to bring home-baked goods to parties. When my wife and I sent cupcakes for my kid’s birthday, they had to be store-bought and sealed. (And gluton-free.) When I was a kid, there were no such rules. My mom often volunteered to be the class’s homeroom mom, and she would always bring cupcakes with black or orange icing and plastic trinkets stuck in the top — sometimes they were little plastic skulls or bats. Often there were party favors like plastic vampire teeth or spider rings and man, I wish they made those things in adult sizes.
After a long day of parading around the school and consuming candy and cupcakes, it was time to ride the bus home. There were a few times (like that Three Stooges year) that the costume I wore to school was not the costume I wore trick-or-treating that night. Kids with painted faces washed their faces to prepare them to be painted once again.
Fast forward and I was so excited for my kids to experience the same things I did. They did not. I don’t think my kids ever wore Halloween costumes to school. There were never any homemade treats. Costumes and decorations in general got more tame. When I was a kid, a vampire’s makeup wasn’t complete without fake blood dripping from the edges of their mouth. As a kid one year our teacher decorated our class’s door with a skeleton hanging from a noose. I don’t think that would fly today. The same goes for fake knives. I remember lots of kids having rubber knives, or those ones that were spring-loaded so the plastic blade would slide into the handle to give the illusion that the blade was going into a classmate’s gut. Not every change we’ve seen over the years was terrible.
Also when I was a kid, those Cooper costumes at least made an effort to replicate the look of the character they were meant to portray. At some point after I had aged out of trick-or-treating but while my brother was still doing it, some marketing idiot decided that instead of recreating the character, they'd just slap a picture of them on the chest of the costume. So you still had to go around in this horrible plastic thing, only now it looked nothing like the thing you're meant to be. And worse yet, it had a picture of them on your chest. The last person who'd go around with a picture of Spider-man on his chest is Spider-man. Still raises my blood pressure to this day.
Our school held a Halloween carnival every year, organized by the 8th grade. The day began with a big assembly, each grade parading around the gym in turn, then it was a full day of themed food, games and prizes. The highlight was always the 8th grade's haunted house. During our year, my friend Jason played Dr. Jekyll. He'd drink from a frothy test tube, then disappear behind a curtain, and I'd emerge all decked out in a monster mask, gloves and the same lab coat. I thought it was a really lame gag until I scared the crap out of this one kid.