The Night of the Butterfingers

I’ve always enjoyed Halloween.

As a kid, what was there not to like?

Out at night, roaming around, unsupervised, with a bunch of other kids (no adults need apply); dressing up as something other than a parochial school kiddo; and getting candy.

I can still recall what certain houses gave out but, come to think of it, most of the houses I remember didn’t give out candy:

• Three houses down: popcorn balls wrapped in orange or black cellophane. When I was in high school, and I was their babysitter, I found out that this family always had candy around for snacking. Just not on Halloween for some reason.
• The house out back: apples. They were and old couple, Irish immigrants. Apparently, giving out apples was a thing in the Old Sod. Well, sod that. Apples we could get at home. Nonetheless, we went and rang their bell because my parents thought it would be mean and un-neighborly not to trick or treat there. And this family was plenty un-neighborly to us kids. Anytime a ball rolled downhill from our backyard to their backyard, Mr. D. hung on to it. I remember my father calling him an S.O.B. (and my mother having a fit at the strong language used around us kids).
• Around the corner: something from Hostess, usually a package of Snowballs. The father drove a delivery van for Continental Bakery. So they always gave out Hostess treats, which I suppose they got at a bargain rate. (If I were a betting woman, I’d say that was the fell-off-the-truck rate.) The father was pretty unpleasant. And one time, while driving that delivery van, he ran over my brother Rick’s trike. Fortunately, Rick was not on it. But I had to walk around the corner and fetch the mangled trike from in front of their house.
• At the end of the block: two families where the fathers were drug salesmen. They both gave out puzzles that were advertising give-aways from some company they repped. The puzzle was always a little disc with a clear plastic cover. The object was the balance three ball bearings on the noses of three seals. Harder than it sounds. Given that we had five kids, and we all trick-or-treated through 8th grade, we must have consumed dozens of those puzzles over the years. Even though they weren’t candy, I always enjoyed getting one.

And then there was candy. The candy I remember the source of came:

• From the folks across Main Street, on the corner of Stearns Ave. A very nice elderly couple gave out 10 cent candy bars (this when a normal candy bar was a nickel): chocolate covered marshmallow witches from Schrafft’s. Fancy-dancy.
• From my grandmother, who gave out treat bags with candy corn and, I can’t recall exactly, but I’m guessing Brach toffees, a candy she always had in her house. We lived at Nanny’s until I was 6, but we were still in the ‘hood. So we had to go trick or treat at her house, even though her house was spooky. Dark, with a dark creepy driveway, and a big, scary shaggy fir tree you had to walk by to get to her back door, which is where she was giving out candy. Plus she was a cranky and downright eccentric old lady. Most kids wouldn’t go there but, jeez, it was our grandmother so we were pretty sure she wasn’t going to kidnap or poison us.

And everyone else on our wide-ranging route..

Anyway, lugging home a heavy bag of candy and looking through the treasures it held – even those nasty popcorn balls and the (yawn) apples – was close to heaven. Even if we knew my mother was going to go through and toss out everything she didn’t approve of –  like unwrapped candy corn, even if it came from Nanny’s, and lollipops, which she set aside (for some reason: I’ll have to ask) for my cousin Barbara, whose trick or treating days were well behind her by the time we were marauding around sugar- and night-crazed.

My mother put all the candy she was willing for us to eat in a communal bowl and parsed it out. Given how much candy we managed to bring in, it didn’t last all that long. I suspect that most of it made its way to my father’s office.

Ah, Halloween…

I will be heading to Salem, where my sister Trish lives. She used to live right off Salem Common, and Salem being Halloween central for the region, she’d get hundreds of kids ringing her bell. There will be fewer in her new digs. But we’ll see plenty of Elsa’s, plenty of Tom Brady’s.

And there will be Butterfingers.

I won’t be in costume. And I’m plenty used to being out after dark without adult supervision, other than my own. But, oh those Butterfingers.

Tonight’s the night!

Happy Halloween!