Orange candles featuring cats, owls, and other spooky characters would also be scattered throughout our house. One particular set of candles that I really adore are two 3.5” tall Gurley branded Jack-O-Lanterns wearing witches hats that I always proudly display! In the late 70's and into the early 80’s, I had aunts on both sides of the family that were heavily into painting ceramic pieces and giving them as gifts. Two particular survivors from back then are a pumpkin on a haystack that was at my Grandma’s and my personal favorite a simple white ghost on a pedestal whose eyes light up! The ghost’s pedestal eventually broke but was glued back and covered with green felt to cover the cracks… so I guess this guy is haunting some golf course?

Choosing and carving out the perfect pumpkin to display at the front of your house during Trick or Treat was also a serious business! I can’t exactly remember where we bought our pumpkins, probably Cardinal’s grocery store in West Jefferson, but we almost always got two of them – one for my little brother and one for me. I always wanted to make sure my pumpkin was a little bit bigger than my brother's, because I was bigger, of course! We would spread newspapers across the kitchen table (remember newspapers?) and start creating our Jack-O-Lantern masterpieces. More specifically, Mom or Dad would take an old wooden handled butcher knife and carve out a pretty classic looking Jack-O-Lantern face, it was then up to us boys to start scraping out the pumpkin guts. These were the days before store bought ‘pumpkin carving kits’ made with fancy handled saw blades, stencils, and tricks for artistic renderings. You got a face with your choice of pointy teeth (which I almost always chose) or square teeth and where to place them. Your eyes were always triangles and if you were lucky that year you might get a carrot for a nose! And of course, back then for illumination we used some old half melted candles mom had in the cupboard, not a high tech battery powered LED hockey puck looking thing like today. Then the remaining pumpkin seeds would get washed, salted, and roasted for a post-carving snack!

Leading to Halloween were fall festivals, art contests at schools, school book fairs, and of course the traditional school Halloween party! Being a kid that loved to draw, I always looked forward to the art contests and still have some of my old Halloween art from elementary school thanks to Mom keeping these things stashed away. Funny, my art subjects have not changed much over the years (some would say at all) but my current subject matter is almost always cartoons, Halloween, or Christmas! I like to think that I am a little better at it now decades later. Some of the seasonal crafts that I (as well as my Mom and our den of Cub Scouts) did were often out of some really great Halloween inspired books straight from the Troll Book Fair that my school would hold each fall. I remember learning to make paper mâché masks with balloons, spooky hanging mobiles, and homemade jointed paper skeletons from these holiday art books!

My first few trick or treats were spent in the southeastern Ohio country along side my cousins. Trick of Treating in the country usually meant driving to and stopping at a few “known” homes that would take care of you with full sized candy bars and popcorn balls (my Gram was locally famous for making some of the best)! As I got older and moved to a suburb outside of Columbus, Ohio I began to take part in these amazing neighborhood Trick or Treats that seemed like explosions of children taking over endless block after block – it wasn’t just something fun to do to get candy, it was an EXPERIENCE! Armed with our orange blow mold pumpkins, we would fill to the rim that plastic gourd in no time going door to door, then rush home to dump it and head back out the other direction! I really don’t recall parents walking with us, but I am sure some did with certain groups of smaller kids. They must have managed to stay back far enough to give us the freedom to really roam house to house and have the time of our lives! It truly was one of the most magical times in my memory as I loved wearing Halloween costumes, being with the roving children of the night taking over the sidewalks (and streets), remembering the “cool” parents that would decorate their homes and wear costumes themselves, and the COOLEST parents that would give out some sort of toy like Chinese yo-yos, small puppets on a stick, rubber bats, or other creepy toys instead of just candy! Then of course, as the night got really late we had to head home as our parents would scatter the loot across the floor to scan over the candy making sure there were no needles, razor blades, or LSD tabs mixed in! Of course, that never happened (to us at least) but you’d hear about it on the news… so ya gotta check! Or maybe that was just an excuse for the parents to scan the candy and pull out what THEY liked the best first while you weren’t looking?  Hmmmm….