Hanging Onto Halloween

 

 Halloween may be this nation’s second most popular holiday, but I won’t be trick or treating this year. My biggest concern this week is how much candy to buy.  In recent years, that question could also be “how much candy do I want to eat in early November?”

 Each year we get less and less trick or treaters and I eat more Kit-Kats.  Ironically, I wouldn’t buy a ten pound bag of chocolates any other time of the year but in mid-October I get this urge to splurge.  I always buy the candy that I like most because I know that’s what kids will like as well.  What would be the point I buying a giant bag of Smarties if I have to eat them for weeks after Halloween.

Parents apparently had few concerns about their children walking all over town asking total strangers for candy in the 1960’s. If it is our nation’s second most popular holiday, what happened to Halloween? 

Some things are better if we don’t try to understand them.  Twinkies would fall into that category and so would Halloween.  Halloween is this country’s second most popular holiday yet most people on the street have no idea what it’s all about. 

The full history of Halloween is a colorful one.  The holiday’s origins actually go back 2,000 years to Celtic harvest festivals and superstitions.  They celebrated Samhain (sow-in) on the night of October 31 when ghosts of the dead where believed to return to earth causing trouble and damaging the community’s food supply.  Romans added their own twist to the holiday and Christians established a holy day called All Saints Day or All-Hallows Day on November 1. All-Hallows Eve gradually became Halloween according to legend.

Somewhere along the timeline, candy corn was created and an American tradition was born. You don’t have to go back 2,000 years to see how the holiday has changed.  Just ask any 40+ adult and they will describe in detail how “the good old days” of Halloween are gone forever. 

My friends and I literally knocked on hundreds of doors and filled one or more paper grocery bags with candy bars – full size of course. We would return to stack our bounty by brand and swap candy bars as though we were trading wheat futures.

As we grew older and roamed on our own, the danger didn’t come from strangers - it came from the older neighborhood boys.  Tribute was often paid in candy bars to teenagers too old or lazy to trick or treat themselves.

 Halloween has always been a weird holiday for kids.  They get to beg from strangers, eat gross amounts of candy and stay out late on a school night.  Try that on March 31 and your kids will get picked up for creating a disturbance. Halloween also differs from other holidays because it often falls on a school day.  Is there a longer school day for kids or teachers than October 31^st?

Of course the big attraction of Halloween was always the costume. My earliest memories are of cowboy vests and chaps sewn from hokey 1950’s Simplicity patterns. Mom finally broke down and bought me the cheap silk Superman costume with the cheaper mask and painful elastic band.  As my friends and I grew older, originality was no longer a requirement.  We were either football players, hobos or guys in a black t-shirts with scary masks. For a short time, Halloween was just too much fun to miss but too cool to participate in. We halfheartedly put together “costumes” and basically hung out at the neighborhood park causing mischief and hoping girls might come by.  They didn’t. 

These days Halloween has lost some of its luster. More homes than ever turn their porch lights off, candy bars keep shrinking and legitimate safety concerns keep kids from roaming far and wide.     

Still, there’s plenty of fun to go around on Halloween and I hope your kids have as much fun as we did when the sun sets on Monday night.

A True Crayon Experience

 

I found some crayons at The Shops at Willowbend today.  I was heading to another store but was drawn into the Crayola store. More specifically, I was drawn in by the comforting smell of thousands (tens of thousands?) of fresh Crayola crayons.

A lot has changed since old folks like me were little kids. Wooden Lincoln Logs are now made of plastic, they put a talking chip in GI Joe action figures and even outlawed lawn darts. What they haven’t changed is the look and the smell of crayons. 

Crack a yellow and green box of 8 or better yet – 64 crayons and you will be transported back to that first week of school in the elementary grade of your choice.  

Crayons for children were first created in 1903 by the Binney and Smith Company.  The two cousins began producing slate pencils for schools around 1900. They next created dustless chalk and one year later perfected the non-toxic and colorful Crayola Crayons. Many have tried but no company has come close to competing with Crayola.  

The Crayola store at Willowbend is part of the Crayola Experience – an interactive crayon playland in the mall that looks like a fun way to kill a winter afternoon with the grandkids.  For now, I settled for browsing the attached store which had every imaginable variation of Crayola product.

The store showpiece is an entire wall of fresh crayons where customers can pick out their favorites and create their own box set. I’m sure it was the aroma of those open-air crayons that drew me in. Every imaginable color was displayed with the date the color was “born.”  Over the years, many new colors have been introduced while others have been retired but here they all were for the picking. 

I found three old “crayon friends” along the wall whose names brought back coloring book memories: Brick Red, Cornflower and Periwinkle.  I think it was the names more than the colors that I remember. Red, blue and purple just don’t have the same allure to a budding artist.

It’s not just the smell or the names that has made crayons so popular. Coloring is one of the first activities we learn to do on our own. A toddler or an eight-year-old can get satisfaction from putting a crayon to page. They choose the color, they pick the subject and create their own refrigerator masterpieces with a little stick of wax.  Coloring is much more than the busy work some parents and teachers think. It’s a license to create within or outside the lines. 

Another reason might be the billions of crayons Crayola drops on the world each year.  The company estimates that it produces 12 million crayons per day which rounds out to about 3 billion per year. That’s a lot of crayons!

I took my three old “crayon friends” home for a quarter each. They now live in my desk where I can open the drawer and catch a whiff of crayons instead of that stinky Elmer’s Glue. 

Send your crayon memories to flipsidecolumn@gmail.com

 

45 Labels Tell The Story

 

   Buried deep in my old stereo cabinet is a tattered red portfolio full of 45 rpm records. Each page is a sleeve that holds one record with a 3” hole to reveal  a colorful label.

   Thumbing through the book I can name almost every record without reading the labels because those labels are so familiar.  The odds are good that orange and yellow swirls on a Capitol Record label means Beatles or Beach Boys.  The solid red Columbia label belongs to my oldest record: The Battle of New Orleans by Johnny Horton. The record is completely unplayable but I can’t let it go.

   The light blue pattern signaled the Rolling Stones on London records and the solid blue label with the white whale was undeniably Happy Together by the Turtles.

  Something I never realized about record labels was how often they changed in the early days of rock and roll.  The most striking example was Elvis Presley who began his career on the colorful Sun label but hit his stride with the black label of RCA Victor Records. RCA was one of the five major labels in the 50’s along Decca, Columbia, Capitol and Mercury Records.

   Beyond the big ones were hundreds of small labels owned by companies that came and went and merged throughout the early 1960’s.  Anyone who owned a stack of 45’s will remember some of the more familiar ones like Bell (Box Tops, Delfonics), Roulette (Tommy James), Dot (Pat Boone), and Scepter (BJ Thomas).

   Teenage record buyers weren’t all that concerned about who owned what but many new labels in the 1960’s were derived from bigger companies.  Columbia Records owned Colpix (later Colgems) the familiar label for The Monkees.   Atlantic or Atco owned Stax Records and Kama Sutra Records (Lovin Spoonful) merged with Buddah (Melanie).

   The 1960’s ended with many of the same big companies dominating record sales although Motown, MCA and the Beatles’ Apple Records gave them all a run for the money.

   I didn’t start this column intending to lecture on record label history. I wanted to say that thumbing through the 45’s was like visiting with some old friends. These guys were played over and over and over again on a cheap phonograph that quickly gave them a scratchy background noise.

   I asked for the record “album” one Christmas so that I could haul my collection of singles around to friend’s houses. We would sit and play take turns playing the new ones or if mom allowed, we would stack them on the grownup’s phonograph.

   While the 45’s were gradually phased out by lps in the 1970’s we continued to have listening sessions in basements and attics and later dorm rooms. I can tell you where I was when I first heard many of the classic rock albums that now fill my IPOD.

   Simply listening to a new recording is something that has been lost with the advent of digital music and headphones.  Listening to a new song is more of a personal experience in earphones or the car although accessibility to music has never been greater.

   My meager 45 rpm collection included 24 records.  Today my IPOD has over 10,000 songs inside of it, including files for every 45 in that old collection. I’d love it if I could have some friends over and we could play them all. They just don’t seem to have the time.  I understand though. According to I-Tunes, my collection is 23.1 days long.