Once before the wonder of imagination began to petrify with age, I absolutely loved Halloween. In our school at South Hamilton Elementary, in White Springs, we all looked forward to the annual Halloween carnival.
In those days, your mama or a good friend made your Halloween costume. There were very few "store bought" costumes. Linda Beth Morgan Waldron made my first costume, a black cat. Sometimes you scraped together what you could find at home, put it together the best way you could and off you went.
One year and only one, I dressed as a ghost, but one of my eye holes was kind of off and I had to walk in the dark seeing out of one eye. I fell down a good bit. I finally gave the ghost outfit up and just walked from door to door with my brown paper bag I had colored with Halloween scenes at school. We all had the same homemade Trick-or-Treat bags.
Our community was certainly not financially rich, we were the sons and daughters of working people; farmers, mechanics, employees of the phosphate company, pulpwooders, salt of the earth people. Many of my classmates would join their parents in that work but, for one night, we fashioned swords covered with tin foil, made eye patches out of an old piece of scrap material, grabbed a single clip on earring when no one was looking and went out to search for buried treasure and Snickers bars.
We won cakes at the cake walk, ate too many candy apples and screamed in the haunted house at the Halloween carnival. No one thought of Halloween as anything but a fun children's holiday. Misguided people have made it into something else, in my opinion. Some of the same people who call Halloween "sin" will eat a fried mule and an acre of collards and wash it down with sweet tea after taking a shot of insulin. You can make sin out of anything.
I know I am sometimes inclined to whitewash the past, at least a little bit, but I do miss the simplicity of those days and I still love it, sitting on my cousin, Rhett Bullard's, front porch in White Springs and watching princesses, ghosts and goblins walk up the steps, shouting "Trick-or-Treat.” We have a ball.
For just an instant, the curtain of time lifts and reveals the memories of lots of fun, even as a one eyed ghost.
From the Eight Mile Still on the Woodpecker Route north of White Springs, wishing you a good day. Happy Halloween.