FEEDING THE GHOULS
Zombie guts and eye of newt make a ghastly (but tasty) Halloween,
Setting out on Halloween suited up as bunnies and witches and fairies with our orange plastic pumpkins to collect candy, my sisters and I were on top of the world.
Coming back home to admire and gloat over the spoils of our labour was what we really lived for that night.
I would sort my candy into categories and sub-categories based on the love of certain candies and the percentage in the mix.
Highest marks went to mini chocolate bars. Kit Kat, Coffee Crisp, Crispy Crunch and Mars Bars were tops.
All other bars were below those, but all had to be carefully reserved. Hershey’s Kisses and Kraft Caramels were next.
Sweet Tarts, Rockets, Life Sav- ers and Tootsie Rolls were in the third category. They were all about equal.
Then there were jelly beans and lollipops. Lollipops were only marginally higher than jelly beans, butterscotch lollies being the exception.
Candy corn, Twizzlers, raisins, pretzels and bubble gum were only for desperate times.
Kerr’s Molasses Kisses were reviled. If they tasted anything like molasses, they would have been acceptable.
Some of them had a peanut butter centre that made the candy bearable, but it was hard to distinguish the peanut butter candy from the regular and I had to chew my way through too many of those nasty things for that small thrill of peanut butter.
One year, we had a pre-Halloween House of Horror tour that the neighbourhood kids were guided through because it was pitch black.
The highlight was a bowl of warm, peeled grapes that their hand was thrust into and a scary voice said, “Bwahahaha! Eyeballs!”
I didn’t care much about Halloween after I grew too old to go trick or treating.
Adult Halloween parties were disturbing, especially as the night grew long and Halloween makeup was drunkenly smeared and sweated off, the revellers turning into slurring, dishevelled, sloppily costumed idiots.
The Halloween party was revived for me a few years back when I had two large, fun-loving dogs.
I got together with friends who had large, fun-loving dogs and we would dress them up in children’s costumes.
The Doberman nurse, a Sailor Moon Labrador, a jester German shepherd and another Lab in a bumblebee costume would be fed treats and at the end of the evening, walked in costume.
The humans would nibble on appetizers and eat scary food while watching horror movies.
These two dishes got the thumbs up in the scary department. They are tasty in their own right, but only if you don’t look at them. “Bwahahaha! Eyeballs!”