Magical Halloween Memories From an 80s Kid

’Tis almost the witching hour and we’re in full swing for Halloween 2022. I have seen so many awesome, clever, and adorable costumes on social media all day. That’s the most fun aspect of Halloween for me, here in my middle age years.

Halloween is one of our country’s favorite holidays. An evening mainly for the younger set to dress up, knock on doors and get all of the free candy and goodies as possible. Sounds like a socialist agenda, to me.

Nah. The GOP kids are thinking, “CAPITALISM!” If candy is currency, I’m knocking on every door possible to become King or Queen of Candyland. Hopefully, y’all don’t knock on doors TOO late at night. I think our folks made sure we were done by 9 pm, most years.

I look back at Halloween as a small child and during our grade school years and have quite a few fun memories. Mainly, it was all about the candy. My folks always took us until we were much older. They were pretty protective of us even in the 80s and 90s. At least we didn’t end up getting dragged down a storm drain by a clown.

My dad always had an arrangement with us. He and my mother would take us for as long as we wanted, provided we listened and behaved. Once we got too tired to do both things, we called it a night. That seemed fair to us. Let’s go do this thing.

Then there was the second part of the arrangement each year. Once we returned home, it was time to pay the piper. Candy Tax. We weren’t the biggest fans of this. However, we had no bargaining power as kids. Perhaps we should have unionized.

At least he took less than Uncle Sam would have. We both would have quite full bags, and I’d venture to guess he only took 10% of each of our stash. Plus whatever we didn’t like, we’d send his and my mother’s way. He liked Butterfinger and M&M Peanuts, while Mom disposed of our Almond Joys and Mounds. Coconut, vomit.

I loved sorting out my candy on the floor of my bedroom each year. I’d put the different types of candy into like piles. Snickers, here. Twix’s there. Milky Ways over this way. Reese’s Cups in their own area. Hershey bars and two piles, with nuts, or without. Those were my top-shelf favorites.

Then you had the fringe candy that you still enjoyed, but was on a secondary level. The top dogs of the middle level for me were Nestle’s Crunch, 100 Grand bars, Baby Ruths, and Three Musketeers. Obviously, my preferences leaned toward chocolate.

Lower-level candy choices included Charleston Chews, caramels, and any number of oddball generic chocolate candies. This was followed by gum, suckers, fruit candy, and even pixie sticks.

Sweet Tarts and Smarties were donated to the poor.

Wait, we WERE the poor. Huh. I must have given those to my mother. Or saved them for desperate times, once the chocolate supply was no more. Crappy candy was always better than NO candy.

Being a bit on the poor side, I don’t recall very many fancy Halloween Costumes. I can literally still see a picture in my head of us wearing flimsy plastic Mickey Mouse and Woody the Woodpecker masks along with our winter coats and jeans.

It didn’t matter. We had a hell of a great time every Halloween. A basic, affordable Halloween costume or mask, a big plastic shopping bag or pillowcase, and a ride from my folks to a number of neighborhoods were all we needed. Let’s not bullshit ourselves, it was all about the free candy.

This was none more evident than the occasional rare house that would leave one of these little numbers, which tested the ethics of any 3rd grader who was lucky enough to have fortune smile upon them:

The trick was going early enough in the evening when the family would leave this on their front porch before heading out for the evening. If you didn’t catch it quickly, you’d miss out.

We justified our petit theft by saying that if we didn’t grab the entire bucket, the next set of trick-or-treaters would. I realize now that this was pretty uncool of us. But shitloads of free candy helped ease the guilt.

Speaking of diabetes, we also didn’t have free reign of our newfound candy fortunes. My folks confiscated our goodies and would allow us to pick a number of them to consume before bed. I’m certain this number ranged between 3 to 5 pieces, so we wouldn’t get cracked-out and not be able to sleep.

One benefit of guarding our candy had to be a couple of freebies for each of them. As we got older, we noticed our bags felt a bit light during the early days of November. We eventually took possession of our candy supply as we reached our early teens. I started hiding mine. I didn’t trust either of my parents and especially not my younger brother.

There was no need to be that greedy. We had desserts all year long. We even got candy here and there, and definitely at Easter and on Christmas. But this candy was different.

We WORKED for Halloween Candy. It was free and we walked miles for it. We counted it, sorted it, shared it, and hid it. We ate far too much of it at times and we suffered from more than a few stomach aches.

But it was worth it. It was always worth it.

Happy Halloween to you all! Be safe out there. I hope you get a ton of Snickers. &:^)