Last week, Hubby and I took Aspie Daughter to the local joke shop to visit the Halloween display there. It is gruesome, bloody and foul and my daughter loves it. She bought a few wonderful items such as a skeletal, headless creature to hang from her ceiling and mist-making equipment. Don’t ask,
She loves Halloween and really misses being in America at this time of year. Growing up in California, she, like her brothers, had a very different Halloween experience than that of my childhood.
We just didn’t ‘do’ Halloween in 1970s Britain. But in my family’s case, we didn’t need to: our 14th century, oak-beamed and freezing cold farmhouse in the English Suffolk countryside was in the middle of nowhere and it was spooky enough at the best of times.
I can remember lying in bed at night, alone in my huge room with the moon beaming its ghostly light through the leaded light windows and being terrified of a hellish wailing echoing out from the surrounding woodland. Convinced in my childish imaginings that it was a ghost screaming out from the wilds of the dark woods in the dead of night, I was petrified.
I later learned that it was the call of a vixen fox. I love foxes but that’s not the point. Listen to this and you will understand why I was so spooked:
There are only three things that I remember which were remotely ‘Halloweenish’ from my younger days:
- One Halloween night, we carved out swedes, put tealights in them and dared ourselves to walk around our old house, surrounded as it was by nothing but open fields and a dark wood beyond; one scream of that
ghostfox and I was back inside quicker than you could say ‘boo’. - As a Girl Guide I once did apple bobbing at a Halloween party. Our Brown Owl dressed up as a witch, a role she seemed to relish rather too enthusiastically for my liking. I left Girl Guides shortly afterwards.
- I was obsessed with an audio (cassette tape) book I owned called ‘Gobbolino The Witch’s Cat‘ which told the story put to music. I used to recite it word perfectly and dance around to it for hours. I admit, was a very strange child…
Gobbolino The Witch’s Cat with Audio
My first real experience of Halloween was as a 19-year-old when I first visited Los Angeles in 1979 and watched the classic Michael Myers ‘Halloween‘ film for the first time. Now I loved all the Hammer House of Horror films with Vincent Price, having grown up with these classics, but I had never seen anything like this, and never mind the slasher bits.
Halloween
No. It was Jamie Lee Curtis carving the pumpkin with the young children she was babysitting that really caught my attention. Glued to the screen, I watched fascinated as dark descended and kids streamed out of their homes, all dressed up in their Halloween costumes running through their neighborhood from door to door ‘Trick or Treating‘.
My American friends were incredulous and couldn’t get over the fact that I had no idea what ‘Trick or Treating’ was.
“What, you’ve never heard of Trick or Treating? Don’t they do it in England?”
“Er, no,……”
When my little boy was just four years old, he experienced his first Halloween, American style. Waiting in line to pay for our groceries, the kindly checkout lady looked down at my son standing next to me and asked the dreaded question:
“And what are you going to be for Halloween?”
We hadn’t long been in America and I thought my son too young to even give it a thought. However, he must have had other ideas because, without missing a beat he replied,
“An imp! I am going to be an imp!”
Maybe she didn’t understand him becasue of his English accent but she asked, ‘What’s an imp?’ So I ended up trying to explain that it was like a goblin, but smaller, and very mischievous. I think. He must have got the idea from a story I had read to him. Thankfully he forgot about the imp idea.
That Halloween we stayed in, locked the door, turned off the outside light, hunkering down against the cold, dark night. It was just the two of us, his father worked the graveyard shift (pardon the pun) and I didn’t fancy opening the door to complete strangers in a strange land where we had lived for only three months.
I had heard rumours of the ‘trick’ part of ‘trick or treating’ and I hoped we wouldn’t wake up to an egg-pelted house. Nothing happened as it turned out but things changed after that first Halloween.
You know the old saying, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em? Well, that would be us. By the following year my son had started Kindergarten and soon enough, Halloween rolled around once again. One afternoon my son came running to me excitedly after school with a letter from the teacher announcing an upcoming Halloween parade. Of course, this meant he needed a costume.
It soon became clear to me that Halloween is the one time of year that American children get to dress up (‘fancy dress’ as we Brits call it) and it doesn’t have to be scary things like witches and vampires. As it turned out, my son already knew who he wanted to be: he wanted to be Batman. Fair enough.
Ready-made costumes seemed expensive to me, so I did the next best thing and made him one. Yes, you read that right: I made my son a Batman costume. Out of felt. It took me hours, but he loved it.
My son in his Batman costume, 1988 – notice the mask, belt , gloves and ‘boots’ are all made out of felt! The cape is polyester and his prized Batman t-shirt, courtesy of Grandma & Grandpa, together with his blue sweatpants completed his get-up!
(c) Sherri Matthews 2013
Close up of the mask – serious business, after all!!
(c) Sherri Matthews 2013
That was all it took. After that, it was the same thing every Halloween – scrabbling up some kind of outfit from home, adding a few shop-bought accessories and of course, it was always last minute. But this was part of the fun. I’m not sure who enjoyed it more, me or the kids.
One Halloween, same son entered a costume competition at his school wearing a shredded pair of old black sweatpants and an old white shirt of mine which we had fun slashing with a pair of scissors and donning with fake blood here and there.
All I bought was a plastic cutlass sword for 99 cents. I dotted a fake beard on his chin with my black eyeliner pencil and several ‘ooh arrr me hearties’ later, he was a pirate. When I dropped him off at school, my heart sunk slightly when I saw the other kids emerging dressed up in their sophisticated, shop-bought costumes. I didn’t expect him to win but the fun we had together more than made up for that.
But we were both in for a wonderful surprise. As it turned out, it was indeed my son who won the day.
Mummy & Terminator 1992
(c) copyright Sherri Matthews 2013
Another year, I made a mummy outfit for my eldest son (thanks to an old sheet) while his then four-year old brother wanted to be the Terminator (his hero).
His older brother’s denim jacket, a pair of sunglasses and a water pistol later, he made an excellent job of running wild, stopping only to aim his water pistol at us shouting, ‘Hasta La Vista Baby’!
Over and over again.
I admit, this may not have been one of my best idea but the boys had fun and it made for a great photo opportunity. For this mum anyway.
As for my daughter, I thought she would just love to be a princess or a fairy or even an angel, but while she did humour me when she had no choice was little, she soon enough put her foot down.
Three kids together Halloween 1994 – An Alien, G I Joe and a Sweet Little Pink Fairy!! All I had to buy were the fairy wings and tiara, a plastic wand and face make-up! The rest we already had, strangely…
(c) copyright Sherri Matthews 2013
Not one for dresses after the age of eight, and being a tomboy at that (this also happens to be a common trait of Aspie females but of course we didn’t know it then, and anyway, I was a tomboy and what’s not to love about being one?), she decided she wanted to be a character from a ‘Zelda‘ video game called ‘Link’.
Her brother’s old school t-shirt turned inside out, worn over thick tights with a hat and sword acquired during one of our visits to an English castle while back ‘home’, and she was sorted. Unfortunately, most people thought she was Robin Hood which made her a bit cross, but I can see why.
Daughter as Link, not Robin Hood! 1998
(c) Sherri Matthews 2013
I adopted Halloween as an American tradition to pass on to my children. So many fun-filled memories of our times together, trick or treating with friends and handing out candy to neighbourhood children.
What frights we had when walking up a neighbour’s garden path only to jump out of our skins as deep groans emanated from a moving gravestone; what silliness singing along to the classic sounds of ‘Monster Mash’ belting out from the house down the road. Nothing like it for spooky family fun, and I will treasure these memories for ever.
Yet, yet…
I still get shivers down my spine when I remember those nights long ago, huddled in my bed ever tormented as an eerie wind carried ghostly shrieks past my window, deep into the black, October night.
Happy Halloween!!
A View From My Summerhouse 
Great post – makes me want to watch Nosferatu again!!
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Thanks cm…I hope you enjoy it when you do get to watch it again 🙂 x
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Great story Sherri a nice history of your families involvement in Halloween over the years
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Thanks Bob, glad you enjoyed reading it 🙂
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Batman costume alone was worth the price of admission. Fantastic.
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Ha Ha! Thanks Michael, glad you enjoyed reading it 🙂
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Wonderful post, Sherri! I love all of the photos of the kids in their costumes. The mummy is too cute! Oh, I remember my sister and I watching the old Vincent Price movies when we were young…so scary!
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Yes, those Vincent Price movies were the best!! So atmospheric! Thanks Jill, glad you enjoyed reading it and also that you liked the photos, they certainly do bring back many happy memories of when my kids were young! Now I get to hand out the candy here. We are the only ones who put a lighted Jack O Lantern in our window and all the local kids love it 🙂
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Oh my, those fox calls are chilling – I’m not surprised you were scared as a child! The screams are almost human! And to be controversial here, I loathe Halloween and how Americanised it has become over here too. As you say, we never had anything like it in the 60s and 70s. We have our own Guy Fawkes night to celebrate, why do we need to copy the Americans? (Sorry….! )
Jude xx
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Yes, that is just the sound I would hear from my bedroom window and my imagination went wild with fear!!! I just couldn’t believe that it came from foxes!
Jude, I know that Halloween isn’t to everyone’s taste. Even in America I knew quite a few families who pulled their kids out of school when Halloween parties were taking place for religious reasons. Since I didn’t grow up with it I had to ‘catch’ the bug and I did, through my own children as you read here. I see that British children now ‘trick or treat’ so yes, it is definitely an American tradition that has crossed the Atlantic. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on it though, I fully respect your views 🙂
The one tradition I couldn’t share with my children was Guy Fawkes night and I mssed that so much as that did play a very big part in my childhood, as in yours! In fact, I already have a post planned for that! 🙂
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It was the same for me living in South Africa when my older children were young, not being able to share Bonfire Night! I did take them to a couple of communal ones on our return to the UK but they never had the fun that I had, chumping for wood, making a Guy, eating parkin and toffee apples and jacket potatoes that had been baked in the embers! Wonderful memories 🙂
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Wonderful memories indeed and I know just what you mean 🙂
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The Vixen’s Scream sounds eerie… certainly wouldn’t want to hear it on one of our hikes in the woods.
Very creative costumes… love the Terminator, Batman and Pink Fairy. This Halloween, my grandson is going to dress up as Batman. And, my granddaughter is going to dress up as a ladybug (ladybird).
Have a very ‘Happy Halloween’ Sherri!
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Thank you Theresa, glad you liked the photos, and yes, you can just imagine how scared I used to be hearing that spooky wailing eminating from the woods around our house in the middle of nowhere!
Ahh, how cute for your grandchildren! Hopefully you won’t be having to make the Batman outfit out of felt!!! My daughter always loved ladybirds (ladybugs!!) and although she never went as one for Halloween, I did make her a ladybug cake once!
You and your lovely grandchildren have a very happy Halloween too 🙂
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The Batman outfit that you made looks awesome. Because my seamstress abilities are somewhat limited, we purchased a ready-made Batman outfit. Now, if we can just get my grandson to wear it… My grandson, Peanut, has tried the costume on twice and both times he immediately wanted out of it. Maybe when Peanut sees other little kids in costumes at our front door saying, “Trick-or-Treat”, he’ll stay in his Batman costume for more than a few minutes. Wish us luck! 🙂
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How cute!! I hope that Peanut enjoyed his trick-or-treating experience and enjoyed his Batman outfit in the end, even if just for little while 🙂
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That was, as we Americans say, “Awesome!!” So enjoyed and I keep finding out more and more about your time here in the States. The costumes were amazing my gifted friend. I agree with Navigator1965. Shhhh…don’t tell your daughter but I did think she was Robin Hood. And as for the Vixen cry I would have never slept a wink. In fact it would terrify me even now at my advanced age! Look forward to your next blog! Happy Halloween my friend!
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Ha Ha! Thanks Diane 🙂 Those Batman photos were taken at a certain school where you and I visited just this April…shadows, Diane…
Yes, everyone thought she was Robin Hood…the character ‘Link’ isnt exactly well known, unless you happen to be a gamer and obsessed with the game ‘Zelda’ and I think she expected everyone to know all about it just like she did!!
I know, can you imagine hearing that Vixen cry at night, alone in your room, with nothing but fields and woods surrounding your house? Very spooky indeed…
Will do another short Halloween post tomorrow…and a very Happy Halloween to you too my friend 🙂
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Awesome, this post made me wish I’d cared more about Halloween when I wurra nipper. I guess it’s because like you I was never really introduced to it. As such it kind of just passes me by now and my kids aren’t that fazed by it. I look forward to Bonfire Night though 🙂
Awesome costumes Batman outfit! I used to LOVE Batman and always secretly wanted a costume. I must admit I thought your daughter was Robin Hood too…
We don’t seem to get trick or treaters round here anymore. The past 2 or 3 years we haven’t had a single one! I can remember stumbling home from college back in the day and kids would already be scuttling around everywhere, before 5pm. I guess parents don’t let their kids out so much now.
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You know Steven, it would have passed me by too if it weren’t for the fact that we moved to America in 1986. It was such a fun thing when my children were young and I grew to love the excitement of it all. I did miss not being able to have Guy Fawkes/Bonfire Night as I shared with Jude above, and I do plan a post on that!
Ha ha! Yes, again, as I shared above with Diane, everyone thought my daugther was Robin Hood and I can’t blame them for that 😉 Glad you like the Batman outfit, thanks for that!
I wonder when trick or treating started over here? In the 90s I suppose…I always tell everyone don’t tell me anything about the 90s in Britain, I was lost to it! We get quite a few here and they all love to see our Jack O Lantern lit up in the window…nothing like getting into the ‘spirit’ of things…sorry, just had to say that 🙂
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Awesome (I’m overusing that lately; it must be all this talk of trick or treating turning me American!). I can’t wait for the fireworks! “Oooooh…. ahhhhh….” obligatory soundtrack for any firework display 😉
I think it was around the 80’s trick or treat really kicked in, I can remember being fairly young and my parents making us close all the curtains and not sit in the front room so nobody knew we were home. So we mainly sat playing Scrabble or reading a ghost story while hopeful children hammered desperately on the door until they took the hint!
Haha! The 90’s are a bit of a blur for me too, in places, but probably for a different reason 😛
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Ha Ha! Steven, I think you and your lovely family are awesome and here’s to a fantastic Bonfire Night 🙂
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Aw thanks Sherri and likewise of course! 🙂
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🙂
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Very interested to hear your take on Halloween – I have my own version coming up at the end of the week!
Lovely pictures of your brood 🙂
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Thanks Jenny, can’t wait to read your post… 🙂
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Halloween was so different here in the Philippines before. I’ve never had costumes and I’ve never heard of trick or treat in my childhood days. Halloween here is Nov. 1 and 2 which are All Souls Day and All Saints Day respectively, National holiday and supposed to be solemn to remember our family and relatives who already passed away. Hours of praying in church and cemetery. It’s only lately that our country has caught up with the American Halloween and I have to be honest, I’ve had fun taking my child to activities and making costumes. We still don’t decorate the house though 🙂
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Thank you Jhanis for sharing your Halloween experience, I read this with great interest as I always love to know how ‘holidays’ are celebrated in other countries.
As I shared above with Jude, in America not everyone was into Halloween, some families choosing not to participate for religious reasons. I struggled with it at first as you read here but I did really love the fun part of it with my children and dressing up and tried to keep too much of the ‘spooky’ stuff out of it. I didn’t give Halloween any ‘power’ if you know what I mean, instead focusing on the fun part.
Of course, being a Brit, for us the big day was/is Guy Fawkes/Bonfire night which is on November 5th so the focus was more on that when I was growing up but I couldn’t share this with my children in America 😦 Can now though 🙂
I hope you and your family have fun whatever it is you do this year 🙂
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You are such a talented Mom. Love the costumes. That’s what’s missing today. Everybody want to buy. It’s more fun turning out with make-do. Nice to hear other’s stories. Wonderful post.
We were in Canada eight months when my father was on graveyard shift and Halloween appeared at our door. My mom had no clue, nothing, nada, no how. She slammed the door so hard and pushed a dresser in front of it, you’d think she’d seen a ghost. Actually, it was a Mr. Bones. 🙂
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Ha Ha! Love this Tess, thanks for sharing your delightful family story! Your poor Mom, I can just imagine! She must have left Mr Bones shaking!!!
I’m not so sure about being talented, but thanks for the lovely compliment and glad you enjoyed reading! I just didn’t want to spend so much money on something for one day’s use and we had much more fun looking for things we already had around the house which could be used for costumes. We may not have looked the most sophisticated but at least we had a blast doing it 🙂
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That’s how it USED to be. We made homemade costumes. Nobody sold them in stores. It was so much more fun. Everyone giddy and full of suggestions and / or questions…
🙂
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Love it.. 🙂
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😀
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Love this post, Sherri, and can see where experiencing Halloween for the first time can be a bit startling. I grew up with the tradition and same with our children and grandchildren here in the US. I love the fun and festivities.
You did a great job on the costumes and, like you, I used to make them too. One year, when my daughter was a baby, I made her a kitten just by drawing whiskers on her cheeks and coloring the tip of her nose. That’s all she went as, dressed in her snow suit, as we walked around collecting candy with our older daughter in her Halloween costume.
It’s interesting it wasn’t celebrated in the UK, when you were little. I’m not sure where it originated but I would have thought the UK would have been a top choice with the history of guillotines and knights or maybe Ireland with it’s faeries and leprechauns.
I recognize the sounds of the fox. It does sound eerie. Living in the mountains, we hear them a lot mostly the alarm barking. I’ve not heard the fighting or playful sounds, though, or the howling.
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Thank you Pat, so glad you enjoyed reading this 🙂 How cute with the whiskers for your baby daughter! I actually did the same with my daughter when she was little too, got a photo somewhere!
I’m sure that Ireland is where so much of the Halloween legend began with all its traditions…wearing costumes to keep away evil, lighting the Jack O Lanterns, etc. …but it just wasn’t adopted here in the UK. However, British children do now trick or treat and we will be handing out candy to quite a few tonight! Also, we will have our Jack O Lantern proudly lit up in our window, the kids love it as nobody else in our street does this! We have a very American Halloween in our house!
Yes, I can well imagine that you hear plenty of those fox cries where you live. Coyotes too I’m sure? I thought this particular clip was interesting with all the different sounds. It is that vixen scream though that gets me everytime!
Happy Halloween Pat 🙂
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You’re welcome, Sherri, and hope you have a Happy Halloween tonight too! 🙂
Actually, with regard to the origin of Halloween, I caught a little bit of a show last night that went into the history of Halloween. It said it’s origins are Celtic and pumpkins, “trick-or-treats”, spooky costumes evolved over time through Christianity and the Catholic church adopting holidays to offset pagan beliefs, i.e., “All Saints Day” and “All Souls Day”.
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Yes, that is very interesting Pat. All Saints Day and All Souls Day are celebrated here in the Church of England. Certainly more was heard about this when I was growing up than about Halloween, back in the day!
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I love that you used to recite and dance for hours. I think all children are delightfully strange; the very essence of themselves. We adults would do well to behave more like ourselves.
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Yes Tracy, I think you are so right, what a lovely way of putting it, ‘the very essence of themselves’. It was in my ‘strange’ moments like this, dancing, walking alone in the woods, playing my flute for hours alone in my bedroom, ‘composing’ songs, ha!, that I felt the most free and could escape into my own, free world. I wonder how many young people get to do this now with so many distractions bombarding them…
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I don’t think very many children have the freedom we had to just be children. I sometimes wonder whether that isn’t why they seem to take longer and longer to grow up.
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Everything about this post is so “normal Halloween” (by our standards), yet your voice shines through uniquely and delightfully. The pictures are great, especially the Batman costume. And I love the things your daughter chose at the shop.
Tomorrow night our dog Maggie will sit in front of the storm door, staring through the glass and wagging her tail as trick’or treaters approach. She especially likes the little ones, all dressed up and giggly, glad to see her.
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Ha ha! Thank you Marylin! Yes, it is all a very ‘normal Halloween’ for you and all my lovely American friends and I’m glad that I was able to share my own unique perspective of it! One thing I didn’t mention is how fascinated I was to see pumpkins growing in fields, how very ‘Americana’ and I absolutely loved it!
Ahh, so cute about your dog Maggie! Sounds like she really gets into the ‘spirit’ of things – pardon the pun! Have a Happy Halloween!
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Sherri those costumes are amazing! You should go into business making and selling costumes. They look so professional. I especially love the batman suit! I should have asked for your advice for my son’s recent need for a costume at school.
The fox noises do sound very eerie especially the Vixen’s scream. Terrifying if you don’t know what it is.
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Well thank you Rachel, that is very kind of you to say, but I’m not so sure about going into business! Although, funny you should say that because when my daughter was younger she was really into Japanese Anime Manga and there is a huge demand for character costumes so that fans can go to cos-plays held in London (like ‘Trekkie’ conventions!!). She has been saying to me for years about going into business and making them but I have never followed through. I just wonder how I would go about it…I used to do a lot of sewing when the children were younger, I made most of my daughter’s dresses (while she still wore them!) and I loved it. I do still sew from time to time. It is time constraints that is against me now.
As for the vixen fox cry, yes, you can imagine why I was so petrified!!
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Gobbolino the Witch’s Cat! My favourite childhood book, I still have a copy! I grew up in the 70s and 80s and we would make lanterns out of turnips (much harder to carve than pumpkins!) – not sure when it started but I know we did it when I was a child. We also bobbed for apples at Brownies. The children used to go around asking for ‘a penny for Halloween’ before trick or treating started to become popular – we had around 10 trick or treaters this year, mostly quite young with their parents and very cute. In relation to bonfire night, there used to be a huge bonfire on a big field on the coast – properly organised with fireworks too – I think it’s a shame this doesn’t seem to happen anymore – health and safety…..
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Ha Ha, thanks Andrea, I think you are the only other person that knows about this book! I have no idea where I got it but sadly I don’t think I have it anymore. Great that you still have yours though 🙂 I loved it!
Great to read your memories of Halloween and also Bonfire Night. Things certainly have changed over the years.
We ended up with 40 trick or treaters, I only know because I had 40 little bags with treats in them! As with you, they were mostly very young, and yes, very impressed with the costumes!
Hope you have a great weekend 🙂
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Thanks for inviting me over to read this post, Sherri. I love the video of the fox’s call – definitely scary!!!!! I enjoyed reading about your Halloween experiences too. We don’t do Halloween in Australia, though over the last 15 years or so more people are starting to join in and shops are jumping in on the commercialism bandwagon. I love that you make the costumes for your family – it’s a wonderful tradition!
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Hi Norah, thanks so much for taking the time to read this post, I hoped you would find it interesting! I used to be petrified when I heard those vixen screams in the dead of night!
Seems the commercialism of Halloween is spreading everywhere. I did enjoy making all those costumes for the kids though, we certainly had a lot of fun 🙂
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I would have been petrified too!
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Awesome post.
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Thank you very much for dropping by Kristen, I’m glad you enjoyed it 🙂
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