Well,
Well? Who took it? Was it you?
Whooo's got my Halloween column?
Heh heh, never fear, I'll find out soon enough... I have my ways... In the meantime, pull up a chair, while I try to set a thing or two straight about this most hauntingly delightful time of year! Have some candy...
Now, "Trick-or-Treating," as we commonly understand it in its modern form, has been with us for approximately 100 years. The modern practice was reported in Canada as early as 1911, and by 1920 there were multiple reports of the custom in the United States, though the actual phrase "Trick or Treat" apparently did not appear in print until late in the 1920's. Early accounts would call it "guising," or "souling," or simply "begging," though by the 1930's the term "Trick-or-Treating" had taken hold nationally.
At any rate, I have been increasingly astonished in recent years at the preponderance of well meaning (but dead wrong) cultural history, in which this wonderful tradition is said by too many to have been inspired by the 1953 Disney cartoon "Trick or Treat," or to have only gained popularity at the end of the 1950's.
Tell that to my mother, who was happily trick-or-treating with her little friends back in the 1930's! Tell that to my brothers and I, who were ourselves out in ghoulish force before the 1950s had come to an end!
Yes, I can personally attest that by the end of the 50's, Trick-or-Treating had already attained the venerable veneer of permanence it retains to this day, and had enjoyed said position for decades already. Indeed, I was astonished when I first learned that kids had not always done such things!
And indeed, I am astonished at the perverse rapidity with which the sands of time have poured through my own glass, so that while I was young and brash when first I began these columns, I find I now have a "veneer" of my own, and am myself as much a window into the past as the stories I have regaled you with in seasons now long gone.
I have become old.
Old, but still brash.
But I digress. As a child I was fascinated by haunted houses, ghosts, witches, Universal Monsters, skeletons – all the trappings of a proper Halloween.
But I was also scared to death of them. My mother once had the lapse of judgment to entertain me with a story from her own childhood, when she had gone on a "dark ride" at an amusement park, and been scared half to death when someone reached out and grabbed her by the shoulder.
That possibility had never occurred to me before. We were at Disneyland at the time, and just about to go on "Snow White's Scary Adventures." I elected to wait outside.
I am fairly certain that I finally rode "Snow White" when I was 29 or so...
I have always had a special love/hate relationship with things that jump out at you. Stories such as "The Golden Arm," for instance – terrible things to suffer as a child – though great fun to do to someone else. There is nothing quite as edifying as reciting in suitably sepulchral tones, "Whooo's got my golden arm? WHOOO'S got my golden arm?" before jumping out at one of the rapt listeners and scaring the candy corn out of them.
But now we are out of time, and I must leave you to your own candy corn, and dead leaves, pumpkins, costumes and the like, and–
Wait! I cannot leave you yet. You see, I am still missing something – something that belongs to me, something I have become rather attached to, you might say.
And so I put it to you again.
Whooo's got my Halloween column?
(silence)
Whooo's got my Halloween column?
(wait for it)
(wait for it)
YOU'VE GOT IT!!!!!!!!!!!!
