It Was Difficult To Give Up Trick-Or-Treating

It was difficult to give up trick or treating. I hung on trying until I was 17. I loved it, but that wasn’t exactly why I’d hung on so long. I think it was actually because it had been so long since I had a trouble free year.

17 was the last. Halloween 1993. A group of friends wanted to go, one or two kids in the group as young as 13. They had no issue, but the adults were starting to yell at the older ones of us. Started to refuse. That put the nail in it. Things were tough enough given that it was 20 degrees Fahrenheit and we were out for a while. I wouldn’t have probably been so committed to that night if it hadn’t been for Halloween 1992, where I had some foster home stuff going and wasn’t exactly able to go out.

1991 wasn’t any better. There was a blizzard and the mayor tried to cancel Halloween. How can you cancel a non-governmental holiday? He did though, due to there being a blizzard. 5 inches of snow or so. Me, a friend, and some kid my friend knew tried to go out anyway. In all the snow. It wasn’t easy, and few people were handing out anything. One lady yelled at us that the mayor had cancelled Halloween (I wasn’t fond of that mayor anyway). Then my friend’s friend had an asthma attack and didn’t have his inhaler. We had to stop at a place that let him call his parents to come and get him. That pretty well ended it.

1990 wasn’t too bad, just not great. It was a school night though and the friend and I that went out in a costume pair (hostage taker and hostage, him the hostage) didn’t go horribly far. Then I went home to watch Pumpkinhead. It wasn’t as bad as most of the adjacent years, but it wasn’t like the years of memory. 1989 was worse though. Seriously grounded for some stuff I’d conflicting with my parents about, my dad let me go about a block or so. That was about it.

1988 was one of the best. Went out for forever. My mom got some supplies from the nursing home she worked at as a nurse and I dressed as a bag of medical waste as a Calvin and Hobbes homage. Wore a pair of snow boots for some reason that I don’t remember, since it wasn’t snowing.

That one was a good year. I probably tried to recreate that for the next six years and only finally gave up when it was abundantly clear it would never happen again.