Halloween history: Costumes, pranks, ‘chicken feed’
Some Halloween costumes have been around for decades. Kids dressed up as witches, ghosts and even princesses, long before Disney. Other getups are inspired by their times: Leg warmers for a “Flashdance” look in the 1980s, cardboard boxes and aluminum foil to create a space robot in the 1950s.
I’ll bet there were a few of those robots at the Hillcrest Elementary School carnivals of my childhood, where most costumes were homemade and apple-bobbing was about as wild and crazy as it got.
For older kids in those days, though, Halloween could be a time for pranks that didn’t always seem too funny to older folks. Overturning outhouses on Halloween seems once to have been a popular pastime, and I’ve been told that outhouses might mysteriously appear on the roof of Apopka High School on Halloween eve in the 1950s. (Many folks have never even seen an outhouse.)
Mayor gets tough
Early in the 20th century, things could get rowdy, too, in Orlando. On Oct. 28, 1914, the Orlando Evening Star described the typical devastation: fence posts knocked over, shrubs damaged, and worst of all, switching the harnesses on horses hitched in the streets and tampering with automobiles — “often resulting in serious injury to both the vehicles and those who attempted to ride in them afterward,” the paper declared.
But that year, Orlando Mayor E.F. Sperry laid down the law. On the paper’s front page, he
issued a warning. Although “reasonable latitude would be admissible for boyish pranks” on Halloween, the “destruction of property would not be tolerated,” Sperry declared. Violators who were caught would receive serious (if unspecified)
consequences.
“The small boy will do well to confine his merrymaking to such harmless pastimes as carrying jack-o’-lanterns and ghostly parades,” Sperry’s pronouncement read.
Socials in orange, black
Halloween is a contraction of “All Hallows’ Eve,” the eve of All Saints’ Day and the start of Allhallowtide, which ends with All Souls’ Day on Nov. 2, according to Britannica.com. Although it has ancient roots linked to the Celtic festival of Samhain, it became popular in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Halloween theme parties were all the rage in the early 20th century, food historian Sarah Lohman notes, and indeed one such party was announced on the same front page as Mayor Sperry’s ultimatum about pranks — an Oct. 30 social sponsored by Lake Eola Circle of the Baptist Aid Society at the grand Overstreet home on Central Boulevard in Orlando.
Halloween-themed parties featured decorations of black, for black magic, and yellow (or orange), since “a deep yellow is the color of most ripe grain and fruit,” according to the “Book of Halloween,” published in 1919.
The food at such parties usually included doughnuts, gingerbread, cider, popcorn, apples, nuts and a Halloween cake that contained a baked-in ring, key, thimble, penny, or button, the discovery of which was said to foretell a coming event such as marriage, a journey or the arrival of money or wealth.
The association of candy with Halloween didn’t come along until after World War II and the sugar rationing during the war, Lohman writes. The exception was candy corn, bowls of which were likely to turn up on refreshment tables at early 20th-century Halloween socials.
Created about 1880, candy corn was originally called “chicken feed.” It was made year-round and not especially associated with Halloween or even fall but was popular at the Fourth of July and in Easter baskets. Its harvest-festival coloring made it a natural for fall parties and it was slowly integrated into Halloween parties.
Lohman tried food expert Alton Brown’s recipe for the stuff, much better than store-bought, she says, with a creaminess and tartness, a sweet and saltiness and an overall complexity of flavor that “can only come from handmade.”
Candy chicken feed was first invented during the 1880s by George Renninger, a candy maker at the Wunderle Candy Company of Philadelphia, according to an Atlantic magazine article on our love-hate relationship with candy corn as it has evolved. Popular sweets in the 1880s included “butter candies” that were molded into nature-inspired shapes such as chestnuts, turnips, and clover leaves.
Renninger’s real innovation was the layering of three colors, which had to be done by hand and made the corny candy seem novel and exciting. You can find more about the origins of candy corn, and Lohman’s experiments with making it, at FourPoundsFlour. com/origin-of-a-dish-candy-corn.
The irony of candy corn is that lots of people don’t even like it, but we wouldn’t have Halloween without it, the Atlantic article notes. About 35 million pounds are produced each year, the National Confectioners Association reports. That’s 9 billion pieces.