Today is Columbus Day and it got me thinking about how we spent holidays when I was growing up. I don't remember anything special about Columbus Day, except we got a day off from school, but I have great memories of the major holidays - Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Since it's officially October, I'll tell you how we spent Halloween growing up.
For many years, there were two separate costumes for each of us enrolled in school. One to depict our "patron saint" (the Catholic saint where we got our name) and worn to school, and one for trick or treating on Halloween night. The school costume got the least effort except one year my Mom really got into it - we had a parade at school and it included Saint Barbara (Barbie), Saint Charles (Cherie), Saint Patrick (Me), and Saint Thomas Aquinas (Tom). We looked like illustrations from a book. I guess Saint Patrick was a bishop, because I wore this painted cardboard mitre (a tall triangle hat) that stayed on my head with stretchy elastic. It was one of the few days I remember that Tom was not in trouble at school - the nuns actually gushed over him.
Our real (aka trick or treating) costumes were alway home-made with clothes and things we already had in the house. Mom was a master at making hobo beards by burning a wine bottle cork and rubbing it (after it cooled!) on our faces. More than once there was torrential rain on Halloween night, so instead of the usual pirates, princesses, hobos and clowns, we became fishermen in our yellow raincoats & hats, black buckle boots, and mustaches made with Mom's burnt-cork crayon.
My favorite costume of all time was the year I dressed as Pipi Longstocking. I wore a red jumper and stripped shirt, with a different strip on my socks. But what made the costume complete is that Mom braided my hair with stiff garden wire woven in - so my braids made the famous Pipi Longstocking U on either side of my head.
I remember coming home with lots of candy, dumping it out and picking out my favorite candy bars, milk duds and wax lips. No matter how hard I tried to make it last, it was always gone within a few days except the stuff like Mary Janes and wrapped hard candy that nobody ever seemed to eat.
When we moved to Maryland, trick or treating became less of an event for me, but I still took my younger sisters and brothers around the neighborhood. By then, store-bought costumes became the usual choice, even though my Mom still resisted spending money on something so silly that could be made at home.
Things are certainly different today. We collected and ate candy from any house we could walk to without anyone looking it over. Costumes were less focused on scary and more on fun. We ran around the neighborhoods without adult supervision from 7:00 to at least 10. And if someone didn't have candy or wasn't home, we'd go to the next house without taking time to egg, toilet paper or damage the first property in any way. Not that we were saints, but we just didn't have time - the focus of the night was to collect as much candy as we could before we went home. Halloween and Easter were the only two times we were allowed to have more than one piece of candy on a given day.
And we'd trick or treated for UNICEF, trying to make the little cardboard house bank as heavy as possible.
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