Monday, October 31, 2011

Halloween

I've been trying to find some more scary stories to tell but then someone pointed out the fact that if I blogged all the good stories I know I would not have anything for the blog next October. Instead I'm going to talk about some of my Halloween memories.

Now, in case you don't know, Halloween happens to be my favorite holiday. I like everything about it: the costumes, the scary stories, the decorations, the free candy, you name it. Growing up I enjoyed all the Halloween crafts we did in school. I also enjoyed hearing and retelling ghost stories. Many a time my friends would gather around me and hear a ghost story or a legend. The apartment complex I lived in would organize a big Halloween bash for everyone, complete with a haunted house. (Yes, this is the same apartment complex with the haunted apartment from my earlier post.) That haunted house provided one of my favorite memories, especially since I would usually volunteer to be one of the monsters inside scaring people. I loved jumping out at people as they walked by, making them scream.

Another memory from my childhood was dressing up and going trick-or-treating. My cousins would come over in their costumes. Now, we didn't trick-or-treat in our neighborhood. No, our neighborhood was poor and gave out cheap candy. (I grew up Mexican, remember?) So what do Mexicans do on Halloween? We drove to the "white" neighborhoods that gave out the good candy! That's right, we would pile into one car and drive to one of the nicer neighborhoods around town in order to score some good candy. We figured we were in costume and they wouldn't recognize us anyway. We would come home with bags full of the "good" candy.

I love decorating the house for Halloween. My parents house would have a graveyard or some other spooky scene on the front lawn. I would put fake tombstones and mulch to make it look like fresh graves. Then I would make zombie hands out of wire hangers, tape and spray paint and place them on the graves as if the dead were trying to climb out. My favorite though was the year that I added a dummy in a chair. I dressed it up in some of my old clothes, added a cape and a mask, and set it out front overlooking my graveyard. It sat there all month long and people got used to seeing it. But the twist came on Halloween night when I removed the dummy, dressed up like it and sat on its chair. I placed the candy bowl on my lap and waited for the trick-or-treaters to arrive. Now, everyone had seen the figure in the chair all month long and didn't realize that I had taken its place. As people approached me I would grab at them or jump out and yell "Boo!" HA HA!!

This is it for this post. As I'm writing this my boys are getting ready to go trick-or-treating and I'm going to take them. My next post will be about Dia de los Muertos. Happy Halloween!

1 comment:

  1. That's right! You go to the better neighborhoods for good candy! lol! My son was so happy yesterday when he saw the rest of his costume. (Scream mask and gown) He did good cuz he brought home a lot of GREAT candy!

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