The smell of burning leaves can take me right back to October of 1949, the fall I turned eight. Back then folks raked their yards into long piles along the road and lit them after supper, so the whole street smelled of smoke and dry oak. The war had been over for four years, but you could see it in the way people lived.
My mother saved string and bacon grease, and nobody I knew threw away a feed sack that could become an apron. She even knew how to keep bacon good for 2+ years, and to me that seemed close to magic. Even so, that Halloween felt like the first one where the grown-ups let themselves have real fun again.
I’m in my 80s now, and I’ve watched the holiday turn into something I hardly recognize. Today it mostly comes off a store shelf, with costumes sewn overseas and candy bought in a five-pound bag. A lot of kids get driven from one house to the next, or they go to a trunk-or-treat in a parking lot and are home before dark.
I understand why parents are careful, because God knows the world has changed. But somewhere along the way we got soft, and we let go of customs that taught children to make their own fun with their own two hands.
A few of those old ways have been on my mind lately, and I suspect some of them will ring a bell for you too.
Our Costumes Cost Nothing and We Loved Them
My first ghost costume was an old bedsheet my mother had already patched twice, and she cut two holes where she figured my eyes would be. She guessed wrong on the left side, so I spent the whole night walking with my head tilted. Store-bought costumes did exist back then, and a few kids in town had them. They came in a flat cardboard box with a cellophane window, and the mask smelled like glue and made your face sweat. But those cost real money, so in our house a costume came out of the rag bag.
The next year I wanted to be a cowboy, which was about as common as a boy could get in those days. My father handed me his oldest felt hat and a jacket with the elbows worn through, and my mother knotted a bandana around my neck. I had a cap pistol from my birthday that I’d been saving for exactly this, and I wore my own boots since they were the closest thing to the real article I owned. I felt like I’d ridden in off the range.
Girls on our street often wore their mothers’ old dresses pinned up at the hem. Some turned a flour sack into a witch’s cape with a little black dye. Flour came in printed cotton sacks then, and women traded them to collect enough of one pattern for a dress.
And whatever flour came out of those sacks, my mother made yeast flakes that lasted for years, and come Halloween those flakes raised the dough for her famous old-school donuts fried in lard. As kids, this was a reason for celebration. Nothing went to waste either, and the next spring that ghost sheet went right back to work as a drop cloth.
Popcorn Balls Wrapped in Wax Paper
Sugar rationing had ended in 1947, and you could tell the folks on our road had been waiting for it. By Halloween of 1949 nearly every treat we got was homemade. The widow on the corner made molasses popcorn balls and twisted each one shut in wax paper, while the preacher’s wife handed out little bags of fudge that rarely lasted to the next porch.
My mother cooked her syrup on the stove until a drop in cold water turned hard. Then she poured it over a dishpan of popcorn and buttered her hands to press the balls together while it was still hot. Her palms stayed red for an hour, but I never once heard her complain.
Out at the edge of town, one farm kitchen set out fried half-moon pies still warm from the pan, filled with apples they’d dried that summer and fried in lard they’d rendered themselves. And that lard came from the hogs they butchered each fall, following this old-school recipe I thought was gone for good, until I tracked it down and put it in my new book. Trust me, you could taste the difference in every bite.
All of that started to fade in the late 1960s, after stories about tampered treats spread through the newspapers. Almost every one turned out to be a rumor, yet parents began throwing out anything that wasn’t factory-wrapped. And I’ve often wondered whether that was the point, since the big food companies were the ones who gained when mothers stopped cooking at home and started buying candy by the bag. That’s about where the consumerist era began, and Halloween became something else entirely.
Bobbing for Apples at the Grange Hall Party
Our town held its Halloween party in the Grange Hall, and somebody always hauled in a galvanized washtub for bobbing. You knelt with your hands behind your back and chased an apple that kept drifting away from your teeth. I never once got one on the first try, so I walked home most years with a wet collar and a cold neck.
The older girls had their own apple game, and it had nothing to do with eating. A girl peeled an apple in one long strip and threw the peel over her left shoulder, and whatever letter it made on the floor was the initial of the boy she’d marry. My cousin swore hers made an R. She married a Robert, and she brought the story up at every family dinner for sixty years.
Then came the cakewalk. You paid a nickel to walk a circle of numbers chalked on the floor while somebody banged away at the piano, and when the music stopped and your number got called, you carried home a whole cake. I won once, a spice cake with brown sugar frosting, and I can still see my mother’s face when I came through the door with it.
You Had to Earn Your Candy Back Then
Nobody on our street handed you anything for just showing up. You knocked, somebody opened the door, and then you had to do something for it. That’s what the words meant. The trick came first, and the treat came after.
Mine was a knock-knock joke, the same one at every house.
“Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Boo.”
“Boo who?”
“Well, you don’t have to cry about it.”
I thought it was the funniest thing ever put together, and I told it maybe thirty times that night without once getting tired of it.
Some kids sang a verse of whatever they’d learned in school that week, while others came with a riddle. The widow on the corner always made you do your piece twice, since she claimed she hadn’t heard it right the first time.
What you got for it was whatever that kitchen had on hand. Popcorn balls and fudge, mostly, along with molasses taffy and sugar cookies still soft in the middle. A few houses gave out apples from their own trees, and one old fellow dropped a penny in your pillowcase instead. Store candy showed up here and there too, penny candy from the five and dime, licorice and jawbreakers and candy corn in a paper sack. But that was the exception, not the rule.
I got nervous about my piece, I’ll admit that. Standing on a porch at eight with four adults looking down at you is no small thing. But you did it anyway, and by the end of the night you’d performed for half the town and nobody had died of it.
That’s the part I miss most. A kid today walks up with a bag held open and walks off without a word, and the whole thing takes four seconds. We stood on those porches long enough to be seen.
Running Loose After Dark With the Whole Street Watching
As soon as supper was over, a pack of us met at the corner and set off in the dark with no grown-up in tow. We carried pillowcases for the treats and a flashlight if somebody’s father would lend one. A porch light left on meant you were welcome, while a dark porch meant the family was out or already in bed. We understood that without being told, and we never knocked on a dark door.
Halloween had a mischievous side back then, and it went back further than trick-or-treating. Older boys soaped windows or rang doorbells and ran off, and out in the country a few outhouses ended up on their sides by morning. In fact, many towns had pushed trick-or-treating in the 1930s and ’40s to keep teenagers too busy collecting candy to cause trouble. The pranksters followed unwritten rules too, and they knew soap washed off and an outhouse could be set back up. Breaking a window or bothering a widow would have earned a boy a trip to the woodshed.
We felt safe out there because the grown-ups were watching, even if we never saw them. Old Mr. Price sat on his porch with his pipe every Halloween night. He’d fought in the first war, so he knew how to spot a stranger casing a street long before the fellow reached the corner. When I wrote the Dark Psychology chapter in my book, as strange as it sounds, Mr. Price was my inspiration. He was trained, he had stories, and he taught us what it meant to stand on your own two feet. In his book that meant knowing how to sew a button, fix what broke around the house, and keep your head when things went wrong.
Meanwhile the older ladies in our neighborhood could guess which child was under which mask just by the voice. If one of us got hurt or lost, somebody would have walked him home within minutes.
What Those Old Traditions Can Teach Us Now
I’ve thought about those years a lot as I’ve gotten older, and I don’t believe it was only being young that made them feel so good. People had less, so they made more with their hands and leaned on each other without thinking twice.
But mostly, we took care of each other. Every Halloween, every Thanksgiving, every little celebration that brought some joy to our simple lives. I remember one year, nine or ten years old, I came down sick on Halloween and couldn’t go out and do my tricks. So my grandmother made the night special anyway. She fed me her cowboy soup and then made me swallow a whole garlic clove coated in honey, which I can still taste if I think about it too long. And then she’d hand me a doughnut, still warm from the pan.
And the neighbors knew how sorry I was to miss it. Linda from across the road brought over my favorite pumpkin pie, with a crust that melted the second it hit your tongue. I found out years later that the secret was lard, the way I wrote about in that piece on the old art of rendering lard. I can’t tell you how much difference that one thing makes in a good old-fashioned meal.
That kind of trust took years to build, and you don’t see it much anymore, not even back in my old town.
But you don’t have to wait for the whole country to change to bring a little of it back. A pan of molasses popcorn balls or a washtub of apples in the backyard is plenty to start with. If you have grandkids nearby, they might grumble at first, but I’ve noticed children love anything they get to make themselves.
This year my great-grandson is coming over to carve a pumpkin from our garden. I’ll hold the candle, of course, and tell him about the fall of 1949 while he scoops out the seeds.
When we’re done, I’ll send him home with The Lost Skills of Independence tucked under his arm.
He told me the other day that he’s proud I’m his grandpa, and honestly, that’s what makes all of it worth it. I can spend my last years in peace, with my memories and the laughter of my great-grandkids in the next room, knowing I’m leaving them something that lasts.
Most of what’s in my latest book I learned at somebody’s elbow, just the way he’ll be learning tonight, and I’d like him to have it written down. So if you’ve got grandkids coming over this fall, hand them a copy too and work through the first project together.
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