I have decided to keep the articles in their original order. Even though Halloween is not in July! Sit for a spell in the cool and enjoy a story of long ago. -Reda
Whenever our rural Alabama schools celebrated a major holiday, it was always a special and joyous occasion for me. Not only did the holidays contribute to my joy, but the seasons themselves, each with their own unique beauties, were just as delightful..
The autumn season in which Halloween and Thanksgiving are celebrated was especially impressive to me, as it is today. The beautifully colored leaves stirred up a wonder in my soul, and the fresh, crisp air renewed the physical energy that had been sapped by the long, hot summer. An abundance of acorns lay everywhere inviting me to step on them in order to hear crunchy, crackling, delightful sounds. Gathering scaly bark hickory nuts, pecans, black walnuts, beechnuts and just plain old hickory nuts, gave excuses enough to take long, lazy walks in the woods, either alone or with other family members. Celebrating a holiday, however, was most often a public experience that centered around school functions.
Pilgrim costumes, complete with black top hats for the boys and big white collars and aprons for the girls, made the acting out of the first Thanksgiving feast an impressive extension of our reading and history lessons.
Halloween was announced, as it is today, with figures of ghosts, witches, bats, skeletons etc. hanging from wherever they could be hung. The teachers and parents of the community usually took advantage of this season to make money by staging a school carnival.
Very little money was spent on preparations for the carnival. A “fishing pond” containing cheap, but neat, trinkets allowed those who paid a fee to throw in their fishing lines to go “fishing”. People behind the scenes attached a prize to the line with a clothes pin and then gave a strong tug on the line as a cue for the fisherman to pull out his “fish”.
The “haunted house” was full of all sorts of things to create weird or icky feelings and sounds. A rubber glove filled with oatmeal, attached to the end of a stick, became a dead man’s hand to be shaken. An “airplane ride” for blindfolded customers jostled and shook them around on a board which was never more than six inches off the floor! (Such was the simplicity of it all ). Fortune-telling, cake walks, and other fun-filled activities rounded out the evenings of fun and fellowship with neighbors, both young and old.
We did not go “trick or treating” in those days, but people made a lot of strange noises in their attempts to create a scary atmosphere. One homemade instrument that produced a horrible sounding noise was made from stretching a cowhide over the open ends of a metal cylinder. After punching a hole in the middle of each stretched hide, a cord or heavy string was pulled back and forth through the holes in the hide. What an **awesome **sound it made! That sound was a major force that precipitated the events of the following story.
On this particular Halloween, we were living in the teacherage which was located between Oxford Elementary School and the country road below. The secret “rooms” had been set up at school, ready to thrill and perhaps frighten those who would pay to be thrilled and frightened. I was chosen to stay home with a young sibling that evening, but from the front porch and living room of our home, I could see all the lights at the carnival, and I could see silhouettes of the parked cars and of people going in and out of the building. In the beginning I felt pretty secure, yet as it became darker and darker and the noises got louder and louder, my secure feeling began to feel shakier and shakier.
I turned out all the lights in our house so that I could see into the darkness better, but eventually the din of noises (which included some cow hide contraptions) reached a level that was intolerable. I had had enough Halloween “fun”, so I took the baby to the car and locked the doors. We were not long in feeling safe enough to fall sound asleep.
When my family came home to an empty house, it was not long before neighbors joined in a desperate search for the two of us. Someone even peeked into the car and missed us, but eventually we were found, and my most memorable and frightful Halloween was over.
Unfounded fears are not limited to children, and the fact that they are unfounded does not make them any less real to the fearful individual. If a child’s unfounded fears are dealt with realistically, his mental perception will probably develop so that he is better able to distinguish between real and unreal fears as an adult.