The joys and sadness of Halloween
With Halloween just past, I started thinking about the joys and sadness that I carry with me about the holiday.
Times were tough growing up in my home and I don’t recall Halloween ever being a big-to-do in my family. Unlike today with most families decorating their homes with ghoulish and scary decorations and going out and buying bags and bags of assorted special treats to give out to all the wonderful, cute and adorable trick-or-treaters: Little girls dressed up as princesses or young boys dressed as their favorite cartoon characters or one of their favorite heroes.
Parents often make their children’s uniquely sewn costumes or go out and buy a special costume for them. But Halloween was a holiday that was something my siblings and I didn’t have fond memories of.
Our parents didn’t buy treats to hand out to children, and they didn’t buy Halloween costumes for us. They barely had enough funds to provide for their own children. We looked forward to receiving treats rather than giving them out.
We were frightened in our home, yes, but not from any ghoulish scary decorations. Pumpkins carved in our home were something that was unknown to us. The only thing my siblings and I carved were our names on our dressers and inside our closets walls. Carving our names was something we often got used to, maybe from being bored or being sent to our rooms after being punished. Most of the time we were frightened with the disfunction and the turmoil that went on in our home.
For instance, the arguing of our parents back and forth with each other, doors being slammed, blatant swearing amongst themselves. Wondering if our father would ever return home after storming out from a heated argument with our mother, or lying awake late at night worrying about our mother being out gallivanting around with our aunt [her sister].
But all of this was standard in our home, and it didn’t faze us but it did frighten us at times. This is the sadness that I carry with me.
The joys? Hmm, I do recall this particular year on Halloween night. It was in the mid 70s and my siblings and I were teenagers. It was a night when our mother was out and our father hadn’t been home for months.
Being that our parents weren’t home, our brother, Ricky, got creative, he was the eldest amongst the six siblings. He had an idea. He said, “We’re going trick-or-treating!”
He was a prankster and a joker. Believing that we were actually going out to get candy was something we didn’t think was much of a joke though…his idea was going through our parents closet and gathering some of their clothing, When our father did storm out of the home, most times he didn’t have time to pack anything. Therefore, his clothing was still laying around the house. Shirts, shoes and pants.
Our mother, well she had house dresses, aprons, shoes and fake jewelry. She also had makeup too. We gathered pillowcases, grocery bags, shoes, pants, dresses. We all got to work creating our very own unique costumes.
My sisters and I put on our mother’s house dresses, jewelry and painted our faces. Ricky got so creative he came up with this idea that he could create a potbelly man from stuffing a pillow underneath the T-shirt that my brother, Gilbert put on also adding an empty beer can in his hand.
Our brothers made fake mustaches with our mother’s makeup. Our brother, Louie, grabbed a bed sheet and cut two holes on it to create a ghost costume. We used pillowcases and grocery bags for trick-or-treat bags to gather our candy. Being able to go out trick-or-treating with my siblings was so much fun!
We laughed so much and returning home with so much candy was a joy. We may not have dressed up as our favorite cartoon characters or any type of favorite hero but we sure looked up to our brother Ricky as being our favorite hero.
The joys and sadness of Halloween are something I will always carry with me.
Yolanda Reyna is a member of the writing class offered through the Cerritos College Adult Education Program. It is held off-campus at the Norwalk Senior Center.