The Harvest Figure

Fall officially arrived this past Sunday, and though summer heat continues to linger, leaves have begun to carpet our lawn. I'll still be mowing into November, though not as often, and mainly to mulch the leaves. Sometimes, when mowing along the shady, wooded side of our front lawn, I find myself longing for cool October evenings and the rattle of dry leaves on the wind.

When I was young, my parents spent fall evenings in the yard, raking leaves into huge piles, often for us to jump into. As Halloween neared, some of those leaf piles were put to more creative use. Out came a pair of Dad's overalls, one of his worn flannel shirts, a pair old work shoes, and garden gloves. In went handfuls of those crunchy leaves to pad and shape the clothing into a reasonably convincing body. Mom sacrificed a worn pillowcase, which she stuffed with leaves and then drew a jack-o-lantern-style face on the outside. After assembling the upper and lower torso, the hands, feet and head, and positioning the body in a comfortable pose on the back step, the finishing touch was added: one of Dad's ball caps.

A photo from 1981 captures this jolly harvest figure—wearing what appears to be an eye patch—as though he's in the middle of telling a good yarn:

If my memory serves me, that was the last time that we had a harvest figure. At least for a while. The reason? We moved the following year from the Southeast to the West Coast, to a milder climate, and to a house with a smaller yard where relatively few leaves fell in autumn. Of course, you can stuff a harvest figure with other materials, but having a large supply of free leaves sure helps. 

In later years, we made other harvest figures, following a similar pattern. We sometimes used newspaper or old t-shirts for stuffing, though I remember that rolled-up towels were good for filling pant legs and shirt sleeves, because they left fewer lumps than wads of newspaper did. Here is our figure from 1998, pre-staged in our living room:

My siblings and I got older and took the job over from our parents, and our displays eventually got a little more elaborate. Instead of just propping the figure up on the front porch, we set him up behind our parents' bedroom window, which looked out on the walkway up to the front door. I had a plaster cast of my face that I had made in a college class, and we put that in a basket and used it as the "head" of our headless figure. 

With the addition of a black light and a Halloween sounds CD, the finished display was quite effective, shown in this 2004 photo:

One year, I put on some spooky makeup and hid just inside the front door, spying through the peephole to see when trick-or-treaters arrived. An older kid—probably middle-school age—walked up by himself, noticed the headless figure in the window, and approached the door. Before he could knock, I suddenly swung the door open and said, "Boo!" or something like that. The startled kid responded with an expletive. I chuckled, and offered a lighthearted apology along with some candy. But the kid, deflated, walked away without taking a single piece. I toned it down after that.

About 15 years ago, I moved back to the Southeast, to the region of my birth. I'm now a father of two boys. For the past two Halloweens, I have made harvest figures the way my parents used to—raking the yard and then stuffing handfuls of leaves into old clothes. Here's how our figure looked in 2022:

Last year, about a week before Halloween, I stuffed the clothes and head and then stored them in plastic tubs until October 31. Unfortunately, I completely forgot about the harvest figure until my wife, sons, and I were heading out the door that evening to trick-or-treat. At that point, I had to say "Oh well." I left all of the figure's parts in those plastic tubs for most of a year. And there they'll remain over the next month, until we assemble them on Halloween!

Thoughts for October 2022

With October here and the promise of another Halloween, I decided to revisit this 13-year-old blog after a long hiatus. Family and work priorities prevent me from giving the site much attention during the year, but the site deserves to remain active. This week I checked old posts and, when possible, updated video links to replace dead ones. I hope to add new posts in the coming weeks.

I originally created Ghosts of Halloweens Past as a way to celebrate my childhood memories of the holiday, by sharing Halloween shows and programs that I remembered from those decades—along with fun and interesting videos that I discovered in more recent years of scouring the Internet.

But it occurred to me that despite its good intentions, this blog is by its very nature somewhat antithetical to my childhood experiences of Halloween. Having been born in the mid-1970s, I grew up in a time when holiday entertainment was more communal. Halloween specials were typically shown only once a year, and network TV stations advertised them accordingly. Catching the annual airing of It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, for example, was a much-anticipated event. As my sister pointed out to me in a recent conversation, part of what made these programs special was knowing that all your friends were watching them at the same moment. And even though we could pop a videotape into the VCR and record the program for later viewing, or eventually purchase an official VHS or DVD of it, a recording never did justice to the actual broadcast, because the communal event had passed. Watching the program whenever we desired meant that the shared experience rarely extended beyond the walls of our living room.

Today such experiences are even more individualized and fragmented. Halloween fans now have the choice of innumerable sites offering holiday fare—Ghosts of Halloweens Past being one of the humbler ones. Meanwhile, it's not yet clear whether It's the Great Pumpkin will be shown on PBS Kids or any other cable TV station this year.

On the flip side, sites like YouTube allow us the privilege of discovering obscure shows—sometimes including commercials from the original broadcasts—which never benefitted from repeat airings or commercial releases. Communal or not, such sites make it possible to re-experience programs that otherwise might have only existed as a strange memory—such as the "haunted Toys-R-Us" episode of That's Incredible from 1978, or The Search for Houdini, probably the most unusual Halloween program aired in 1987.

Thankfully, TV entertainment is only one part of a holiday that is still very much a communal event, at least in my neighborhood. Costumed children and their families will be seen along the sidewalks, and walking up to houses they otherwise never visit, and speaking to people with whom they otherwise never chat. And despite the potential for glorifying darkness and evil on Halloween night, in my experience the holiday can still bring out the best in humanity.

Here's to a wonderful Halloween 2022!