In his maydecembersecrets.com website my friend Ron talked about his childhood happening in a more innocent time. I think that was true for me, too, even though it didn’t necessarily feel innocent around Halloween.
We went trick or treating on Halloween but it was different from today in many ways. Although we often ate too much candy during and after Halloween, we didn’t have to be careful about needles, razor blades or other additives that parent must check for today. We also received homemade items that would probably be thrown away today. I remember the popcorn balls, in particular. Popcorn was mixed in melted caramel, formed into a ball, and then wrapped in waxed paper. They were so good we often ate them as we walked and never wondered if the person who made them was wearing surgical gloves at the time.
We had to work to prepare for our Halloween pranks, if I can actually use that term to describe what we did. I lived in an area that had several small farms and garden plots close to me. By October all of the harvests were in and the fields had only the remnants, like corn stalks, remaining. Inevitably there was corn missed when the ears were removed by hand. We would comb through those rows of dead corn and always found several ears of dried corn.
We removed the shucks to get at the dried kernels inside. Then we took the ear of corn in both hands and twisted our hands back and forth on it over an open paper sack. This twisting motion released the kernels into the bag leaving only the empty corn cobs (which we occasionally used to make pipes.) It required a lot of ears of corn but we would usually end up with four or five pounds of corn kernels in the bag. By the time we were finished we had some very sore hands, too. I don’t know why we didn’t wear gloves.
Our children would probably laugh at us for calling what we did next a prank. We had two ways to display our displeasure at any home where we were not given candy. We carried our bags of corn along with pieces of soap as we went from house to house asking for candy. If we got none or no one was home we either soaped their windows or threw corn on their porch, or both. We really got even, huh? It didn’t occur to us to do any damage. That was as mischievous as we got until we became teenagers.
Today, carloads of children are taken from neighborhood to neighborhood. The candy is all that matters. I do believe some of these children may have little candy during the year but the waves of kids are too much at times. It’s also not unusual to wake up the next day and find pumpkin pieces scattered in the road where kids have taken jack-o-lanterns from porches and thrown them into the street. It felt like enough to us to just throw some corn. We enjoyed the artwork on all of the jack-o-lanterns too much to destroy them.
Times change. Kids change. Ideas of fun change. We were definitely “greedy” for candy at Halloween but ours came from homes in our neighborhood. We didn’t consider asking our parents to take us somewhere else. I don’t think they would have, anyway, and we still got more candy than we needed.
As I close this post I leave this thought with you. Halloween may have changed. Throwing corn might have been replaced by throwing pumpkins. However, if you enjoy eating candy corn during the Halloween season you can thank me and my friends and those Halloween pranksters that came before us. That candy corn represents the kernels of corn we threw. The yellow and white colors make it look just like the kernels of corn we so laboriously separated from their cob. I’m glad we could do that for all of you.
