The Rear End

Halloween!

the defining holiday in a young boy’s dorky life

Mike Paulus, illustrated by Beth Czech |

I ask you: how can a grade school kid not love Halloween? It’s simply impossible. A deep love of Halloween must be built into our DNA or something completely scientific like that. Seriously, kids are born to fall in love with Halloween.

Unless that kid is born in a country where they don’t celebrate Halloween.

I went to grade school at St. James Elementary over on 11th Street in Eau Claire, and I loved Halloween. I was a self-conscious fat kid, so my love of Halloween was largely internal, but rest assured, it was all I thought about.

I used to sit in a corner of the school library with a stack of Halloween books and just stare at the pages. I wished we could dress up everyday. I wished it was always nighttime and mysterious. I wanted to live in a haunted house next to a cemetery and eat peanut butter cups for the rest of my life.

Oh. And the parties. My god. Our class parties were the best – we had cupcakes and orange-flavored punch and Smarties and those chewy peanut butter things no one likes but me. There were skeleton-themed crafts. There were pumpkins. And we got to dress up.

Nowadays, too many schools don’t allow costumes on Halloween, and while I’m sure they have good reasons for that, I’ll be damned if it wasn’t a positive experience. How can you not have high self esteem as you walk through your school’s front doors dressed like Chuck Norris from Missing in Action (2)?

Try it.

And then of course, there’s the actual trick-or-treating. It seems like trick-or-treating hours are much earlier than they used to be. It seems like I used to be out getting candy until midnight, or later, but perhaps I’m remembering it wrong. Maybe I’m just imagining trick-or-treating the way it happened in those school books. At any rate, it was fun and it was the most fun at night. I loved roaming the neighborhood in disguise. I felt like I was in on some kind of spooky secret or something.

The combination of costumes, ghosts, monsters, mystery, candy, and more mystery – all under a night sky –well, that’s just heroin for a kid.


    But sadly, Halloween doesn’t always feel like a big tub of candy corn you get to swim around in. My most memorable – and perhaps worst – year of trick-or-treating happened in 1987. I was in the fifth grade. I’m just now realizing that, apart from a spontaneously dorky outing my senior year of high school, this was the last time I ever put on a costume to go out and get candy. But that’s not why it stands out to me.

October of 1987 was a big month for me because my family was packing up to move to a new town – on November 1. So I got to go trick-or-treating with my best friend Dan one last time and then leave the very next morning. Yee-haw.

I lived on the (north) west side of Eau Claire and even to this day, when I drive through those neighborhoods, I think about trick-or-treating. And if I drive down my old street, usually the first thing that comes to mind is saying goodbye to my friend right before I climbed into a moving truck. It was a grey, overcast morning that I’ll probably never forget. I was really nervous, and I didn’t know what to say. But I didn’t need to say anything because Dan just stuck out his hand for a firm handshake. I remember being thrown off by this. It was such an adult thing to do.

I shook his hand and then I drove away, and the last thing on my mind was Halloween. Although I probably ate most of my candy on the hour and a half drive to our new house.

I don’t want to make this seem like too huge of a deal because we moved back less than a year later, right into the old neighborhood. But of course, things were never the same. The friends to which I returned had moved on to new things, and I was still kind of stuck at the point where I had left. They were busy playing basketball all the time, while I still play with was still playing with my Star Wars toys. It was hard finding my place again.

And there was no more dressing up for trick-or-treating.

Maybe I’m so in love with the Halloweens of my youth because one year Halloween just changed, and so did everything else around me. I guess I wasn’t ready for that.

At any rate, grade school Halloween parties are important. Spooky books in the library are important. Dressing up and trick-or-treating beneath the stars is important. It gives us that strange and amazing mixture of fear and excitement that can only happen once a year when we’ve eaten enough sugar to kill a zebra. These things recharge our sense of wonder. They teach us to celebrate and crave surprises. Halloween is a night that proves the world is still hiding plenty of secrets and treasures. And we need to keep searching for them. We should never stop searching.