I'm Surrounded By People Of The Candy Coma Kind
Well, last night was a doozy of a night for yours truly! I got to run around our lovely little burg in half my Steampunk librarian costume and turquoise sneakers. In fact, I truly looked like a crazy bag lady, and should have been trick or treating myself, so authentic was my decorative finery.
Alas, I am getting a head of myself. Perhaps it is due to the fact that I just finished an hour long Body Pump workout and my arms feel about like Twizzler Pull and Peel licorice. Man, have I seen a lot of that in the last twenty-four hours. Anyway, Halloween is a pretty adored holiday in my family. I grew up around a heavily divided thought culture when it came to the holiday. On one side were a group of people who thought the day was down right evil and shunned it entirely. The other side was a bunch of free spirited folk that embraced all that is make believe and free candy from strangers.
My mom was super cool about it. She took us trick or treating as kids, but we also were not allowed to dress up as anything scary or bad. As I had about a yard of hair most of my childhood, I was Pippi Longstocking a lot of the time. It was easy, I just braided my hair, stuck some wire in my resulting pig tales, adorned myself in some mismatched finery, and off a candy hunting I went. My brother was a logger a lot of the time, I remember mom drawing a beard and mustache on him with her eyebrow pencil. As dad was a timber faller, a logger costume was pieces of cake to come up with. Ahh, the good old days.
I mean, now there are entire Halloween stores to peruse! My daughter had a vision for her costume, and at thirteen years of age is definitely in the crux of the epitome of opinion. So last Sunday we went to the store of All Hallows Eve to procure things like face paint and fake blood. Let me tell you, that store was hopping. Fortnite has even infected the Halloween store, there was a whole section!
I guess after reading that previous paragraph that you might see what camp I am in when it comes to Halloween. I absolutely adore the whole dressing up as something and getting candy from your neighbors part. I also love the harvest parties that the local churches throw, and the trunk or treat events that are so super popular. I like anything that our community decides to do together!
That said, I did have a pretty massive reminiscing moment while I was combing the streets with my gaggle of heathens. You see, by the time I was my kid's ages I would have been out alone running the streets, trick or treating with abandon. However, we all decided to be cool and take some of the smaller siblings out on our foray last night instead of just turning the big kids loose. It was fun. It also reminded me of the Craig, Alaska Halloween. The one of GK legend.
When I was about twelve, my Pippi Longstocking clad self lived in Craig, Alaska. Situated on the eastern shore of Prince of Wales Island, Craig was a fishing and logging burg deluxe. When we moved there in 1991, there was such a housing shortage that my grandparents moved in with my uncle and aunt in a trailer court and let us have their studio apartment. Did I mention that the place was on the ocean over the water in an old dock type house thing? The pneumonia happened cause I slept on the floor. That was fun.
Anyway, by the time the great trick or treating occurred, we had lived in Craig a little over a year or so. At that point we were dwelling in a super fancy travel trailer from the 60's with a wannigan attached to it. A wannigan is an Alaska thing. Basically it is a room added onto an abode. It is usually made from rough cut lumber. That lumber was probably milled on your buddy's sawmill in trade for some alcohol of some form. Our trailer came with the wannigan and we were just thankful for a home to live in.
Halloween night my brother and I, along with our friends Tracy and TJ, took off with pillowcases into the great unknown. Mom gave us strict instructions to stay away from downtown. Downtown Craig consisted of a LOT of bars and men that would steal you or worse. It was so bad down there that our local police would come to the school and show us all of the accessories that littered the grounds around the doors of the bars, lovely things like dimebags, needles, and drugs of the hard kind.
Message received, we stuck to the houses and went hard. Here's the thing. There was only one grocery store in Craig. It was also almost the end of the working season for fishing and logging. So basically you had a town full of people with tons of money to burn.
I still have yet to see the volume of candy that we collected that night occur in another setting. The grownups in Craig had cleared out every bit of candy, large and small from everywhere in town. We are not talking about just little bars of chocolate, I had tons of full size and even king size candy bars. One drunk man was handing out scratch tickets, that was pretty cool, and another guy was handing our dollars in different denominations.
We figured out which houses were full of partying and inebriated adults and made multiple visits. By the time we quit for the night I had over three pillowcases full of candy and things. It was probably the greatest Halloween haul of all time. It took me a couple of days just to sort it all, and I had so much candy that I had to re-bag and freeze some of it. In fact, when we went south for Christmas to see my grandparents, we actually had to throw some of it away!
So, as I was pounding the streets with my kids last night, I thought upon these things and it made me realize that even though my upbringing was a little different than most, it was definitely a good thing. Although I am secretly happy that my kids are ecstatic over a grocery bag of candy, I mean, not everyone can experience a glucose gold rush like we did.
Hope everyone had a glorious Halloween!!!
And as almost always, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's very festive iPhone.
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