When my brothers and I were growing up on the farm I don’t recall we did anything for Halloween. The “town kids” may have gone trick or treating, but we didn’t. We did make the usual decorations at our Happy Corners School. Not infrequently, the decorations were attached to the windows as the first snowflakes fluttered to the ground.
Teenagers with driver’s licenses often did some mischief, like tipping over outhouses and corn shocks. Some mail boxes were damaged. There seems to be a story from even further back about a model T ending up on a barn roof. We knew nothing of the Reformation.
At Concordia College the dean roused us out early on October 31 for a Reformation service at Luther’s statue. Include the chill in the Minnesota air, Luther’s shoes painted white, according to the style of the late 50’s era and the pumpkin nestled in his folded arms it didn’t have quite the effect the dean intended. Don’t ask me what Reformation service was about. One time those going for breakfast were confronted by the VW Beetle of a female faculty member sitting at the stop of the stairs in front of the cafeteria.
The fondest memories of Halloween were from Marshfield, Wisconsin when we took our children trick or treating. My wife claims she always took them. But I remember rainy/near snowy evenings with their paper sacks when we had to hold onto the bottoms of their papers sacks lest they drag on the wet ground and we lose all our loot. We parents stood back in the shadows and watched as our kids approach the houses.
Those days are past. A concern for the safety of our children and our worry about the effects of too much Halloween candy has changed things. Halloween has been taken over by adults, which is rarely a good thing. But I suppose those who tipped over outhouses regretted the advent of indoor plumbing. All there seems to be on TV this week are horror movies and political ads, not much difference between the two. Maybe I’ll reading a Martin Luther Reformation Day sermon, if I could only find one.
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