Day 304: Happy Halloween! Back in the old days, when I was one of the trick-or-treating youngsters in Milo, Idaho, there were already snowdrifts to trudge through to get to the houses. A parent had to drive us, because all of the houses were a half-mile apart. And we had to wear our winter coats over our costumes. Do you feel bad for us? You needn’t. It could’ve been a Halloween buzzkill, but our neighbors made up for the weather with amazing treats. Candied apples, popcorn balls, homemade donuts, hot cider and hot cocoa - pretty much all the homemade things we are banned from dispensing to our neighbor children these days.
Mom made the best of our wintry situation by coming up with warm, yet awesome, costumes. They were always pulled together from stuff around the house. My favorite was the gypsy fortune teller. All I needed was a colorful flowing skirt and shirt, a lot of scarves, and pretty much all of Mom’s jewelry. An old snow globe became a crystal ball, and voila! Fortune teller! Mom insulated me with two layers of thermals (she called them Long Johns) underneath my costume to ward off frostbite without ruining the gypsy effect.
When my son was living in Italy, he encountered plenty of real life gypsies, so it’s most likely not culturally sensitive to dress up as a gypsy nowadays, but in Milo in the 1970s, it was pretty epic. Funny, for a fortune teller, I did not see that coming. Oh, well. Ghouls just wanna have fun, right?
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