Halloween is one of my favorite times of year.  Not just because you have a legit excuse to eat candy but because it’s a day that you can pretend to be something you aren’t.

I loved Halloween as a kid but my mother was poor, she couldn’t always buy me a costume.  One year she put an old sheet over me with holes in it for the eyes.  It wasn’t a great costume since it was a pink flowered sheet.  I don’t think anyone was convinced I was a ghost lol.

Sometimes she would get her make-up out and dress me up as a hobo.  I would wear my oldest clothes that had holes in them and she would get them dirty and make the holes bigger.  She would put a 5-o’clock shadow on my face and then she would find a stick and tie a bandanna on one end and it would have socks in it to make it look like it had stuff in there.

Some years when she had the money she would buy a costume but I was never given a choice in the matter.  Here is an example:

This is a pretty lame costume but it’s the only Halloween photo I have.  I was the easter bunny for Halloween lol.

The costumes weren’t always this lame though.  Some years I was dressed up as a clown with the clown hair, some years a cowboy and since my parents loved country music, we all had cowboy hats so that costume didn’t cost a dime.  One year my parents bought fatigues for everyone and we were army people.

No matter how good or bad our costumes were, it was fun to go out and be someone else for a few hours.

When we were old enough, when I was 9, we were sent out on our own.  My sister was 11 and she usually baby sat me anyway and it was a bunch of us, my 3 cousins, my sister and I, we would go around the neighborhood trick or treating in the neighboring apartment buildings.

My parents never took our candy away from us and mixed them together, although they did go through them to make sure there were no razor blades and they would toss out all the fruit.  But then we were given the rest in our bag and allowed to eat that as we wanted to, which was usually until we ended up too sick to eat any more.  Then of course when our tummies felt better we would eat more until eventually the candy was gone.  The bags usually lasted a few days.

Just because I’m all grown up doesn’t mean I don’t still enjoy the holiday.  I started carving pumpkins around 1997 with those cool pattern books with the saws and I would carve a few patterns every year.  The last year I carved a pumpkin was in 2007, that’s because Darrin joined a church that doesn’t allow their members to enjoy Halloween and he wouldn’t let me put my pumpkins outside anymore out of fear that he would get kicked out of his church.

My fun was stamped on but I still enjoy Halloween and I will never stop because I feel that my body may be getting old, my mind is still that little child in that bunny costume.

Happy Halloween everyone!  I hope it’s a great one and I hope you don’t get too many cavities from all the candy you are about to consume.