When I was growing up, I loved Halloween. Me and my sisters loved dressing in weird clothes and going around the neighborhood stopping at each house yelling “trick-or-treat” at the top of our lungs. Mom would make our costumes and make us up as devils and ghosts and we carried around a brown paper grocery bag to collect our treats. At each house the neighbors would have a big dish of candy, and without fail, they would try to guess which kids we were.To entertain us they would always say we were the wrong kids and we’d laugh about how silly the grown-ups were. The best houses had the real bar candy, but we were happy to get bazooka bubblegum (remember the cartoons?) and whatever hard candy was on sale at Woolworth’s. We always got our pumpkins a week before Halloween. Mom didn’t like them sitting out rotting, this was Hawaii and October 31st was still hot enough to rot your pumpkins fast. I sliced my hand open one year carving my pumpkin. I had claimed the big butcher knife and was creating the scariest pumpkin you could imagine. My hand, slippery with pumpkin guts, slid up the blade as I stabbed the pumpkin. Blood spurted everywhere and mom lifted me up to the kitchen sink and washed my hand clean. She made me sit down and hold pressure on it till it stopped bleeding while she finished up my pumpkin for me. I remember trying to tell her where to cut so it would be as scary as I wanted. I think she did a good job. Later she looked at my cut and taped it up herself, she was a nurse and we had be next to dead to go to the hospital. I still have the scar, I make sure to point it out to people every Halloween to prove my Halloween cred. The best part of the night was when we had hit all the houses in our neighborhood we’d go back home and count our candy to make sure none of us got any more candy than the other. Except my older sister, she was the boss so if she got extra it was just her due. Mom would put our grocery bags (we wrote our names on them so they wouldn’t get mine and vice-versa) on top of the refrigerator and let us have some every day till it was gone. So Halloween was stretched out for about two weeks. When we got older, we were just as much into creating a spooky obstacles the kids would have to come through to get candy from us girls. The best one was when I took my big sister’s basketball and rigged it up so I could dangle it over the outside stairs. I covered with a sheet and pulled it up and down while shrieking and moaning. One little kid was scared so bad he wouldn’t come up, so my big sis (the nice one) took the candy down to him and showed him it was just a basketball. I was mad at her, I thought it was really cool the way the kid screamed. Now-a-days all I have to do to get kids to scream is to go out in public with no makeup on. Amazing what changes 30+ years makes.