The things I remember most about Halloween from my childhood are carving pumpkins and trim-or-treat. Pumpkins were a special treat for our family. Like many families with several children, there were plenty of things that we shared. At Halloween, however, we each got our own pumpkin. I don’t remember much of the process of selecting the pumpkins, and I suppose that they were probably selected for us by our parents. We knew that there were larger pumpkins that existed and a few families in our town would sport jack-o-lanterns carved from bigger pumpkins, but we each and a pumpkin a foot or more in diameter, large enough to make a good jack-o-lantern.

We had to cut the top out at the right angle so it would go back in without falling through. Then came the chore of removing the seeds. We’d set out newspapers to receive the gloopy mess of seeds and strings. It was a chore to scrape the inside of the pumpkin and get everything cleaned out. Then came the fun part: carving the face. I put my efforts into the mouth. A little smile wasn’t bad, but the important part was to leave a bit of pumpkin in the cut out mouth space to resemble two or three teeth. Somehow a smile without any teeth didn’t look quite as good. Circles are hard to cut, so noses usually were triangles and sometimes the eyes were too. If you were really careful you could leave a small circle attached in the bottom of an eye to resemble a pupil. Next, you had to cut a chimney in the pumpkin to let out the smoke and drip wax from the candle onto the bottom to hold the candle upright inside the pumpkin.

My mother was a stickler for proper food and nutrition a long time before it was popular. We often had what we kids considered to be rather strange treats at our house. One year it was pencils. A new pencil is a nice thing, I guess. And they were orange. And my mom did make little pumpkins to attach to the eraser end of the pencils. But still, you can’t eat a pencil. The year she did toothbrushes wasn’t a hit, either. The trick for us as trick-or-treaters was to share notes on who was giving out which treats. You wanted to make sure you got your share of candy bars and hard candy, but cookies and brownies weren’t bad, either. If someone was giving out apples, which was common, you wanted to get that in the bag before the cookies, or the cookies might crumble when the apple was dropped in. Caramel apples were a special treat. Popcorn balls came in a variety of recipes. Some were better than others. We quickly rated the treats from various houses and shared information with siblings and friends as we cruised up and down the streets. Our town wasn’t all that big and we didn’t really have any neighborhoods that kids had to avoid.

Back in those days, people didn’t go in for outdoor decorations much. If it wasn’t too windy, we’d put our pumpkins on the front porch. If it was windier, we’d set them up in the windows. Sometimes we made paper jack-o-lanterns at school and hung them in the windows as well.

Some kids in our town had store-bought costumes, and I think that we had them once or twice. Store bought costumes usually consisted of a plastic mask, held in place with an elastic string and a cheep plastic smock that pulled on over all the rest of your clothes. There were some halloweens when I was a kid when it got pretty cold. Mostly we made our own costumes out of old bed sheets. Ghosts were popular in our town. Sometimes we experimented with some one’s old make up. The ever popular hobo costume consisted of clothes with holes in them, an old hat and whiskers drawn in with black - regardless of the color of the hair on top. It never occurred to us in those days that it might be strange for all of those blond haired kids to have such black beards. Our town was rather strong on persons of Norwegian heritage. Some years we got fancy and tried to make animal costumes, but the year we made the two-person horse costume, we fell short of our design goals. And it was really hard to follow someone around all evening bent over at the waist hanging on to the other person’s waist.

I was thinking about all of this because I read somewhere that Americans are expected to spend a whopping 7.4 billion dollars on halloween this year. Plans at our house include some treats for the neighbor children. We live on the edge of town and don’t get too many trick-or-treaters, but we like to see the kids in their costumes and like to have something to share with them. That’s about it. Even with the predicted 7% to 8% increase in chocolate prices this year, I’m thinking we’ll spend less around $5 between the two of us in our house on halloween this year. If I did my math right, to get to 7.4 billion the 316 million people in the United States have to spend an average of $25 per person. That puts us at about 10% of average. Someone else has to be spend a lot more than we do in order to bring the numbers up where they are.

Of course, we aren’t investing in adult costumes, a big slice of annual halloween spending. And our cat isn’t much for clothes - pet costumes amount of $350,000,000 of sales annually in the U.S. We’ll spend $0 on pet costumes this year, the same as our budget has been for all of our married life.

It is possible, however, that the statisticians haven’t considered all of the costs of the holiday. We always keep our cat inside and safe just in case there is a less than kind prankster out and about, but I’ve heard that halloween can be stressful for pets. I know it was for my brother’s cat the year we put it in a paper bag and took it with us. As soon as the bag was opened, the cat shrieked and ran for home as quickly as possible, but not before drawing blood on my hands. Did they figure in the cost of band-aids in their estimate of Halloween expenses?

I wonder how much Americans spend on pet psychiatry following such stressful experiences. We’ve never invested much in that field, either.

Hope you have a happy holiday.

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