A Giraffe, a Shot Glass, and a Pair of Hot Pants

The wee one in the blue & white sweater is you know who . . . sitting next to my brother, on top of my sister, along with two neighbor girls.

Since moving here I've noticed that Santa Barbara is seriously into Halloween.

Houses get festooned top to bottom with yards of fake cobwebs, giant purple spiders appear on rooftops, ghoulish severed heads appear on fence posts—and in some neighborhoods—the trick or treaters mob the streets just like days of yore. Over by the university, in Isla Vista, the Halloween party is of epic proportions with college students routinely throwing up all over their costumes. Up the hill where I live, we don't get that much action. It isn't a neighborhood really, and most of the other residents are elderly, and therefore unlikely to don spiderman costumes and ring bells let alone play tricks (although some of them are scary enough on an everyday basis to make it seem like Halloween even when it isn't.) Still, it makes me happy the place is working so hard to bring Halloween back.

When I was little, in the swinging suburban sixties, Halloween was only a close second to Christmas in terms of sheer joy. Every family seemed to have a minimum of three kids, and usually more—our street was so jammed-packed that we must have outnumbered the adults 5 to 1. On Halloween we roved the streets in small mobs, spreading out for miles, lugging home the loot in pillow cases so heavy they dragged on the ground. Costumes were mostly homemade and of the witch/pirate variety and people actually passed out caramel apples wrapped in wax paper, and we were actually allowed to eat them. Shocking, but true!

My earliest memories of Halloween revolve around my father. He was usually only a murky presence in our world, home after work acting either scary or charming—you never knew which—drinking martinis with cocktail onions. But he must have loved Halloween. One year he made an elaborate giraffe costume out of chicken wire and papier-maché. It fit over your shoulders with a little hole cut out for your face so you could both breathe and see. The neck soared up over the shoulder-rests ending in a sweetly-painted giraffe face complete with doe eyes and little horns on its head. I don't recall what we wore underneath but I imagine my Mom stitched something giraffe-like that we could wear under our Mighty Macs (it was always freezing and she was always insistent on our being bundled into near-immobility.)


My sister peaks out, looking pleased. In truth, she says she found it awkward to trick or treat in. . . a little too heavy and hot. She says she appreciates it more now though!

The other major Dad/Halloween association is him taking us trick or treating—a job he oddly relished. Since this was in the sixties before the country got politically-correct, the fact that my father took his young children trick or treating with a shot glass, singing out an ironic "trick or treat" as he raised the glass high, was greeted with only hearty guffaws and liberal pourings of scotch at every door. Nowadays it might have you calling social services, but not only did no one mind, they all thought "How clever of the good doctor!" He must have been thoroughly bombed by the time we got home, but the memories are only good, so was it really so wrong?

But the crowning moment in Dad's Halloween hi-jinx was the "autopsy" that he performed for the neighborhood children. He commandeered the family room and disappeared for several hours. He sent out word for all to gather at a prearranged time and emerged, in full surgical mask and gown, as the macabre Mad Doctor intent on eeeevvviilllll. He ushered us in, single file, to stand round a make-shift table upon which was a "corpse" covered in a cloth. The lights were dimmed to near black. The autopsy started with"body parts" being passed from one giggling, grossed-out child to the next. Cauliflower for brains, peeled grapes for eyeballs, candy corn for teeth and so on. He cleverly substituted a deliciously tactile facsimile for each of the major organs, entertaining us with a running narration in a singularly hair-raising voice. Naturally, it was a huge hit.

After my parents divorce when I was eight, there were no more fancy costumes like the giraffe, but we still insisted on them being homemade. Some of the more memorable: my sister's "feminist" outfit complete with skin-tight hot pants, tall boots, headband, and picket-sign that said Down with Male Chauvinist Pigs!; my Arab sheik costume during the 1970s oil embargo—very popular with the parents at the time and sadly, newly appropriate for today; a particularly lame cardboard turtle costume for my little brother, made without much effort, that we still feel a bad about.

As we grew up and the world grew scarier, it seems we didn't need Halloween that much anymore. By high school we went to parties only; by college, we barely did that. The generations behind us found the old freedom to wander the town unescorted sharply curtailed, then outright banned. Those caramel apples disappeared and only "safe" wrapped candy was passed out. Planned parties became the norm and that one wild night—when we were not only freed by our costumes to be something other than our usual selves, but also free to roam around in the dark, ring the doorbells of strangers, and revel in the whole risky adventure of it all—was lost.

But maybe—just maybe—not forever. . .