Halloween Memories!

Back when my kids were still young and innocent enough to want to go trick-or-treating, for a few years we went to some suburban friends cul-de-sac-filled neighborhood.

I found out that trick-or-treating with a special needs kid is angering: every damn house has a few steps on the walk leading to the front door. Do you know how mad it made me to pick up my 3-year-old in his wheel chair and carry him to the front porches? Do you know how sad it made me to leave my 4-year-old at the first step, and have to point at him and ask for candy on his behalf. WTF? Doesn’t anyone who uses a wheelchair count?

I went through the kids’ hauls to weed out those stupid, yet terrifying-to-children Jack T Chick pamphlets.

I found Big Daddy at least twice. Suburban dumbass evangelicals actually give out Chick tracts on Halloween.

I discovered Chick tracts in a Dairy Queen in Emporia, Kansas about 1974. I believe I found This was your life and was absolutely, irrationally terrified by it. Turns out that many people discover Chick tracts in bus stations or public bathrooms.

My friend David was raised a Baptist, had childhood nightmares about the finger-eating satanist from Chick’s The Crusaders comic books, probably #2, The Broken Cross.

In 1996, David and I went to the Arvada, CO Hell house haunted house. We had a pint of schnapps (I think, some kind of cheap liquor) that we drank in the parking lot. Unfortunately the line was so long, I had sobered up before we got to the loathsome and ridiculous haunted house. Inside, I found that Satan can make pizza boxes fly, and that Hell smells like catfish dough bait.

That year, Hell house included a He is Risen scene. The actor playing Jesus only had stigmata painted on his palms, not the back of his hands. When he noticed this, David leaned over and whispered, “those lazy Romans only drove the nails in halfway”.

Due to this and several other episodes of laughter, the Hell house people didn’t even bother proselytizing us in the gift shop.

Many years ago, around 1971-72, I went trick or treating with my friend Jeff in his neighborhood. Sesame Street was brand new. Jeff convinced his mother to make a full on Cookie Monster costume, complete with lots of blue fur and bulging eyes. Naturally, it rained. When we got back from trick or treating, Jeff found that the rain had soaked through the blue fur, and dyed him blue.