A Gen X Halloween! Looking Back - Trick or Treat, Decorations, Costumes, & More from the 70s & 80s!
As I am writing this it is officially the first day of fall, and a step closer to one of my favorite holidays – Halloween! For years I would always joke that Halloween officially starts when my wife, a teacher, would have to go back to school to get ready a week before the kids come for a new school year. I would say it jokingly, but as the years went by stores in town would be putting fall and Halloween decorations out for sale earlier and earlier and of course now we have full-blown Christmas stuff displayed before we even get to October! But honestly, the early Halloween stuff never bothered me much because I was READY! Ready for cooler weather, falling leaves, pumpkins, ghouls, goblins, ghosts…oh my! Thinking back to the holiday's past, I can’t help but think how lucky this Gen-Xer was to have experienced some of the last Halloweens before “healthy” treat options,“trunk or treats” at church parking lots, “safety” orange tipped toy guns with costumes, and (my pet peeve) having Trick or Treat on ANY other night but October 31st, became part of the norm!
The Halloween and Trick or Treats of my youth took place in the 1970s and early 1980s. Thankfully I had grandmothers and parents that were big fans of the season, as well. This helped make my Halloweens have a very vintage look and feel as many of the decorations and traditions were handed down from them. One of the most obvious things to me was the amount of vintage decorations we used year after year – many dating back to the 1950s and 1960s. Paper decoration brands like Beistle and Dennison were synonymous with “spooky season” and seeing them brought out once a year was eagerly anticipated! Thankfully, many of my family’s original paper decorations have survived the decades and proudly adorn my house today. Some I have actually laminated in an attempt to keep them usable before they fall completely apart. Mixed in with those classics are reproduction paper decorations from Beistle and some cool retro-inspired stuff by Retro-a-go-go. These classic wall hangers really help bring on the old school Halloween spirit!
Another staple in our house were candles, hand painted light-up ceramic statues, and a particular vintage Halloween
battery operated Jack-O-Lantern that was my father’s. Dad’s tin and glass small Jack-O-Lantern was battery operated and made in Hong Kong by a company called AMICO. As far back as I remember it never worked as the batteries had corroded the insides long, long before my time. And the orange and black paint had slowly fallen off the inside of the glass pumpkin, but it’s a great connection to the holiday and my Dad’s side of the family! Orange candles featuring cats, owls, and other spooky characters would also be scattered throughout our house. One particular set of candles that I really adore are two 3.5” tall Gurley branded Jack-O-Lanterns wearing witches hats that I always proudly display! In the late 70's and into the early 80’s, I had aunts on both sides of the family that were heavily into painting ceramic pieces and giving them as gifts. Two particular survivors from back then are a pumpkin on a haystack that was at my Grandma’s and my personal favorite a simple white ghost on a pedestal whose eyes light up! The ghost’s pedestal eventually broke but was glued back and covered with green felt to cover the cracks… so I guess this guy is haunting some golf course?
Choosing and carving out the perfect pumpkin to display at the front of your house during Trick or Treat was also a serious business! I can’t exactly remember where we bought our pumpkins, probably Cardinal’s grocery store in West Jefferson, but we almost always got two of them – one for my little brother and one for me. I always wanted to make sure my pumpkin was a little bit bigger than my brother's, because I was bigger, of course! We would spread newspapers across the kitchen table (remember newspapers?) and start creating our Jack-O-Lantern masterpieces. More specifically, Mom or Dad would take an old wooden handled butcher knife and carve out a pretty classic looking Jack-O-Lantern face, it was then up to us boys to start scraping out the pumpkin guts. These were the days before store bought ‘pumpkin carving kits’ made with fancy handled saw blades, stencils, and tricks for artistic renderings. You got a face with your choice of pointy teeth (which I almost always chose) or square teeth and where to place them. Your eyes were always triangles and if you were lucky that year you might get a carrot for a nose! And of course, back then for illumination we used some old half melted candles mom had in the cupboard, not a high tech battery powered LED hockey puck looking thing like today. Then the remaining pumpkin seeds would get washed, salted, and roasted for a post-carving snack!
Leading to Halloween were fall festivals, art contests at schools, school book fairs, and of course the traditional school Halloween party! Being a kid that loved to draw, I always looked forward to the art contests and still have some of my old Halloween art from elementary school thanks to Mom keeping these things stashed away. Funny, my art subjects have not changed much over the years (some would say at all) but my current subject matter is almost always cartoons, Halloween, or Christmas! I like to think that I am a little better at it now decades later. Some of the seasonal crafts that I (as well as my Mom and our den of Cub Scouts) did were often out of some really great Halloween inspired books straight from the Troll Book Fair that my school would hold each fall. I remember learning to make paper mâché masks with balloons, spooky hanging mobiles, and homemade jointed paper skeletons from these holiday art books!
And of course, the big finale was the classroom Halloween party – brought to you by the amazing room mothers! We would play the classic games like a creepier version of ‘Pin the Tail on the Donkey’ and dropping clothespins into a Mason jar to will small prizes. Of course, all of us kids would marvel at each others costumes. Funny, thinking back I am sure there were some really wonderful homemade costumes that parents had labored hours over. But as a small kid, we didn’t care about that stuff – we cared about who had the most coveted Collegeville, Ben Cooper, and HalCo brand Halloween costumes! You know, the one with the plastic smock and thin plastic mask that you couldn’t breathe out of - and dang sure couldn’t see! Who was Fonzie this year? What about Batman? I know in 1981 I had Ben Cooper’s Boba Fett costume, and I was darn proud of it! We were served cupcakes, Kool-Aid, potato chips, Halloween decorated sugar cookies, and of course candy that got all of us costumed ghouls hyped up on sugar and excited for the upcoming main event – Trick or Treat!
My first few trick or treats were spent in the southeastern Ohio country along side my cousins. Trick of Treating in the country usually meant driving to and
stopping at a few “known” homes that would take care of you with full sized candy bars and popcorn balls (my Gram was locally famous for making some of the best)! As I got older and moved to a suburb outside of Columbus, Ohio I began to take part in these amazing neighborhood Trick or Treats that seemed like explosions of children taking over endless block after block – it wasn’t just something fun to do to get candy, it was an EXPERIENCE! Armed with our orange blow mold pumpkins, we would fill to the rim that plastic gourd in no time going door to door, then rush home to dump it and head back out the other direction! I really don’t recall parents walking with us, but I am sure some did with certain groups of smaller kids. They must have managed to stay back far enough to give us the freedom to really roam house to house and have the time of our lives! It truly was one of the most magical times in my memory as I loved wearing Halloween costumes, being with the roving children of the night taking over the sidewalks (and streets), remembering the “cool” parents that would decorate their homes and wear costumes themselves, and the COOLEST parents that would give out some sort of toy like Chinese yo-yos, small puppets on a stick, rubber bats, or other creepy toys instead of just candy! Then of course, as the night got really late we had to head home as our parents would scatter the loot across the floor to scan over the candy making sure there were no needles, razor blades, or LSD tabs mixed in! Of course, that never happened (to us at least) but you’d hear about it on the news… so ya gotta check! Or maybe that was just an excuse for the parents to scan the candy and pull out what THEY liked the best first while you weren’t looking? Hmmmm….
November 1st – All Saints Day. As a kid, I had no clue what that was nor had I even heard of it back then. All I knew is that I had a belly ache from eating way too many sweets the night before and I had an entire YEAR to wait to do it all over again!
Recently a friend commented on some old photos of mine from when I was a kid that I had posted online. He is ten years older than me, but mentioned how my old pictures looked exactly like his childhood. Before personal computers, cell phones, and the internet it seemed like our culture evolved at a much slower rate. My childhood holidays and their traditions appeared to be closer to my Baby Boomer parents' early youth - compared to what my Gen Z son had growing up. Still, for the past few decades my wife and I have decorated our house each fall with that vintage and retro-inspired spooky flair, and have kept doing some of the same fun customs passed down over the years through family. Hopefully, he will continue on some of those same old-time Halloween traditions!
I am ready for cooler weather, falling leaves, pumpkins, ghouls, goblins, ghosts... Man, I still love Halloween!
Questions or Comments? Please email me here: [email protected]
Please check out below for more vintage Halloween photos and memories!
My dad's AMICO battery operated lantern. It's in rough shape and hasn't worked in years, but it is still a really cool piece!
My cousin's with their Strawberry Shortcake and Snow White Ben Cooper Costumes in the early 80s!
A year of "homemade" costumes in 1981, my little brother in a Native American costume originally worn by me a few years prior and sewn by my Mom with a Simplicity pattern. The headdress was a souvenir from Cherokee, NC that my Dad got in the early 1960s. There is a matching tomahawk (that he isn't holding in this photos) that hangs on the wall at my parent's house, today! I always love pirates and you can barely make out the homemade "hook" on my right hand and you can see my flintlock pistol hanging from my belt! I was really happy with this costume when I was little!
Light up ceramic ghost and Jack-O-Lantern on a haystack from the late 70s-early 80s. Around that time several women on both sides of the family had gotten into doing ceramic art. These are two survivors of that time. You can see the crack on the ghost's bass. It had been glued back together and the felt covering as an attempt to cover it up. In non-Halloween related ceramics, I still have a Mickey Mouse statue and a light up Darth Vader night light made by my Aunt sitting about 8 feet from where I'm typing!
A larger look at this image posted above. This was my last Halloween before moving from Ohio to Alabama, and you can see me as Dracula with his black and red cape spread in the back surrounded by his fellow costumed Cub Scouts in 1984! I remember as Halloween approached I eagerly looked forward to see what this years costumes would look like, particularly the quality on the vampire capes and vampire blood would be! I liked the more 'Vaseline' based vampire blood because it stayed bright red and in the position where you applied it all night, as opposed to the more wattery (yet more accurate) fake blood that just dried up and turned brown in no time! Little details like that always seemed so important to me. I guess they still do!
A few paper Halloween cut outs. You will noticed the large Beistle cat face has been laminated. I've since done the to the large Dennison non-jointed cat that has the green eyes in an attempt preserve them as they've become more fragile. Cut outs like these are one of my favorite things about Halloween, and the art has been very influential in how I think of the Holiday. I also have several styles of pumpkins and skeletons, including a wonderful life-sized original Beistle skeleton. The jointed Beistle cat below that you see one my kitchen backsplash is a reproduction, and I can't help but wonder if the identical cat used at Walt Disney World's "Carousel of Progress" attraction is also a reproduction or an original?
A few holiday candles. The pair of Jack-O-Lanterns with the witches hats at the bottom are Gurley candles, but the Owl and more yellow colored one have no marking son the bottoms.
The neighborhood gang in West Jeff! This is another photo from 1982, and you can see a nice array of costumes from store bought to homemade! This is another shot from a Trick or Treat that I posted above in the article, and you can see my bother in a Ben Cooper Yoda costume and me with a Spooky Kook's costume on - that giant inflatable bat on my head! Spooky Kooks first came out in 1979 and were a line of vinyl inflatable headpieces and a plastic smock with some matching grease paint to hide your face and match what was on your head. You could get various pumpkins, goblins, spiders, but I had to have the bat! Of course, as a kid I didn't know a damned thing about white boys shouldn't be painting their faces black... but what can I say? I was seven and the bat on my head was black! I thought it looked cool then!
More Ben Cooper and homemade costumes from the late 70s. You see the Devil twice here, with the second Devil photo next to the ape being a hand-me-down year for one of my cousins. You can see me in the Native American costume with the vintage tomahawk and headdress from Cherokee, NC. I loved playing with that hawk and the headdress... I was infatuated with Native American stories like Tecumseh, so I was dressing up and playing with that stuff all year long. The headdress eventually fell apart and every feather disappeared. And low and behold decades later with the advent of DNA testing I find out I have ZERO drops in native blood in me!
Here is a larger repost of my Kindergarten class in 1980 from the story above. I am Boba Fett dead center, although the Ben Cooper mask seems more gold and red than anything movie accurate to me. I am actually holding my baby brother in a little clown suit. Mom was a room mother helping put the party on, which is why Nick is there. But I can spy Superman, Arthur Fonzarelli, The Hulk, one of the Pumpkin Spooky Kooks, my old pal Huckleberry Hound, C3PO, and even Paul Stanley of KISS! These were great times!
A more current view of my kitchen table with some Beistle reproductions from the large window, and my vintage Beistle Skeleton on the door heading to the back porch! The hanging decorations are modern pieces made by Retro-A-Go-Go who make fantastic items from Halloween decorations, art prints, bobble heads, signs, gifts, and collectibles inspired by monsters and vintage pin-ups!
And finally... Popcorn Balls! My maternal grandmother Grace made and handed out popcorn balls that she would make each Trick Or Treat. I never thought much about it until years later after her passing that people my age, older, and younger would tell me, "Jason... your grandmother always gave out popcorn balls at Halloween and they were SO GOOD!" That makes me smile. Here is a photo of my brother and Grandmother making popcorn balls for Halloween in 1981 and batch a that I made with my Gram's simple recipe if you'd like to try them out yourself!
Have a Safe and Happy Halloween!