While we're on the topic of Halloween-themed books, here's another one that predates me but which I only learned about through library books my wife checked out for our sons—Halloween with Morris and Boris, written and illustrated by Bernard Wiseman.
Like the Nate the Greatbooks, this series features recurring characters. In this case, the two main characters are Morris the Moose and Boris the Bear, and the rapid-fire humor and running gags in these books are very much in the vein of old vaudeville and comic teams such as Abbott and Costello. In other words, you may find them occasionally tedious—as Morris constantly misunderstands Boris (the comedic foil of the duo) and Boris responds with mounting frustration.
Halloween with Morris and Boris is no different, though in my opinion, it's the most interesting book in the series. Here Boris must explain to his simple friend how trick-or-treating works, to convince Morris to participate. The characters literally stumble into their costumes, but have to swap when people are too scared of Boris to give him any candy. The pair end up being invited to a children's Halloween party, where they bob for apples, play Pin the Tail on the Donkey, and listen to ghost stories—before Morris gets frightened of his own reflection and runs away.
Wiseman's illustrations are great, and his limited color palette of orange, blue, and black works surprisingly well. It's fun to think of this odd couple of clowns roaming my neighborhood tonight, trying their best to fit in.
I don't remember reading or even hearing of the Nate the Great books when I was a child, even though the first in the series by Marjorie Weinman Sharmat was published in 1972, almost a decade before I entered kindergarten.
But I discovered and came to enjoy the character through my eldest son, who has enjoyed checking out these stories from the library and even adding some to his own book collection.
Nate the Great and the Halloween Hunt is, naturally, one we enjoy reading together this time of year.
For those not familiar with the books, Nate is a nine-year-old detective whose friends enlist him to solve various problems—typically a lost item or pet. Nate interviews people and, with his dog Sludge, follows their leads from location to location, gathering clues along the way that eventually reveal where the missing object is.
In Halloween Hunt, a cat belonging to Nate's eccentric friend Rosamond goes missing, and instead of trick-or-treating, Nate spends his evening following the trail of clues—even sneaking into the neighborhood's "old haunted house," where the cat ventures every Halloween.
My favorite part of this short book is Marc Simont's artwork, which is wonderfully atmospheric.
Happy Halloween Eve! Family, work, and other responsibilities left me little extra time for updating the blog this month—my apologies!
However, the holiday has been on my periphery over the past few weeks. I actually stopped at CVS with my sons in early September to see what Halloween items were in stock. So here is this year's entry in my Halloween Aisle series.
First off, this was my first CVS visit specifically to evaluate its Halloween offerings. In my last two installments (see Part 1 and Part 2), I profiled the Halloween aisle at my local Walgreens. This time, it was plainly obvious that CVS, at least the store closest to me, had much less to offer. There were only a few packages of grease and cream Halloween makeup, and a couple of different fake tattoos. What was there seemed overpriced.
For example, CVS is selling one 0.7-ounce tube of white cream makeup for $4.99 this year. Last year, Walgreens sold a $5.99 cream makeup kit that included a 0.75-ounce tube each of white and black cream makeup, along with three smaller tubes of red, green, and metallic makeup. Have prices seriously inflated that much in one year?
Cans of colored hairspray actually seemed more reasonably priced. Seeing these always brings back memories of dressing as the Joker, with sprayed-green hair, for Halloween in 1989.
Unfortunately, the cream makeup, fake tattoos, and colored hairspray were the store's only available options for dressing up. Well, I take that back—there was one "ghost face" mask inspired by the Scream movie franchise. Almost all the other items in the Halloween aisle (really only half an aisle) were related to decorations. There were a couple of different pumpkin carving kits.
These kits with paint, stickers, and other push-in/stick-on applications allow younger children to decorate pumpkins without having to carve them. For the same age group, CVS also had a couple of Halloween-themed magic ink activity books.
The fake cobweb fluff—which we sometimes put up by our front porch for Halloween when I was a kid—seemed reasonably priced.
The next several photos show the miscellany of other Halloween items for sale—knick-knacks, candles, themed blankets and accent pillows, and candy buckets.
Here are a couple of animated Halloween decorations that the store was selling (please pardon my blurry photos). One item I didn't get a picture of was a skeleton hand that, with the push of a button, "walked" on its fingertips. My sons enjoyed trying that one.
At least in early September, CVS's selection of Halloween candy was small, compared with what Walgreens stocked in the past couple of years, though I've seen worse prices.
Judging by what's available near me, I would definitely choose Walgreens over CVS if those were my only local suppliers for Halloween costumes, makeup, decorations, and candy. Maybe CVS stores in other locations are better stocked.
Even so, my sons and I enjoyed checking out the Halloween aisle that day, back when we were still anticipating the official arrival of autumn.
It's a given that Walmart, Party City, and other big stores are going to have a wider variety of Halloween costumes than your local drug or grocery store will. However, when I was a kid, the drug store was usually our first stop when time came for costume shopping.
I wrote about this last year, in a post about the Halloween aisle of our local Walgreens. While heading out on some errands this morning with my eldest son, I decided to stop by there again, so that he could check out the Halloween aisle for himself.
The offerings were quite similar, particularly in the scarcity of costume items—though I admit that it's late in October and that there may have been more on the racks a month ago. Today there were only two masks: a skull face and an alien.
There were several different packages of Halloween makeup—tubes of fake blood and creme makeup, oil crayon makeup, and a "Deluxe Makeup Kit" that included various pots and tubes of grease and creme makeup, as well as fake blood, "tooth out" and "fake scar," and several applicators.
Hanging near the makeup kits were some clothing accessories—witch gloves, a pumpkin beanie, and a few different pairs of Halloween socks. Underneath those were decorations such as light-up jack-o-lanterns and strands of holiday lights, and also some classic-looking jack-o-lantern candy pails.
Other decorations included signs, skeletons, witches, ghosts, spiders, and cobwebs.
Some of the items weren't easily identifiable. I did spot some treat bags—though not the cool paper ones my mom used to get.
The sweets heavily outweighed the costume and decoration offerings, though marked-up Halloween candy undoubtedly brings the bigger profit. I always enjoy seeing the holiday packaging.
The store had a better—though still slim—selection of costumes last year, but overall, the offerings were about the same. Not great, but certainly better than nothing. Next time, I might try CVS, less than a block away, or the Kroger across the street, to see what they have in stock.
We didn't have a Spirit Halloween store near us when I was a kid.
At Halloween time, we had a few other options. We didn't have Walmart, but we had K-Mart. Then there was our local mall. There the Hallmark store usually had, in addition to its holiday greeting cards, a section of Halloween costumes and items close to the front of the store. I vaguely remember picking up a free Halloween costume catalog from Sears in the mid-1980s, though I don't recall ever buying anything Halloween-related there. Another mall staple, Spencer's Gifts, sold Halloween masks years before the company bought out the Spirit Halloween chain in 1999.
Although I remember Toys 'R Us primarily for its selection of magic tricks and kits—such as the Magic World of Blackstone Beginner's Magic Set—the store carried enough Halloween merchandise to publish its own annual costume catalog. And because I watched reruns of That's Incredible during the 80s, I also associated the store with the haunted Toys 'R Us in Sunnyvale, California.
For costumes, candy, decorations, and other Halloween paraphernalia, I mainly depended on the holiday aisle of our nearest drugstore, Sav-on Drugs. The selection was limited, though I didn't think so at the time. It was where I went when I needed a pot of green makeup, a cassette tape of sound effects, or a bag of candy corn.
One cassette tape that I'm pretty sure I bought at Sav-on was titled "Horror Sounds of the Night." I used the tape as the soundtrack for numerous homemade radio shows and videos over the years, including my own "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" movie. My tape copy was defective, as much of it had a screechy sound that was obviously not intentional. Here is someone else's good transfer of the tape on YouTube:
Another fun find from the mid-1980s was the Create-A-Face Complete Makeup Kit, which included six colors of makeup paint, a tube of vampire blood, glow-in-the-dark monster fangs, "icky teeth," an eyepatch, face adhesive, various "special effect pieces" like bullet holes and a stitched wound, and a waxy "blend" that supposedly helped hide the edge of the effect pieces (it didn't). Though the kit looks pretty underwhelming in hindsight, it seemed like the stuff of professionals when I was a kid.
There are no more Sav-on Drug stores as I remember them (most became CVS Pharmacies). So yesterday I stopped by the Halloween aisle at my local Walgreens to buy some candy to give out (in one week!) and to see what other things they had on the pegboard racks.
The costume selection was a bit sad. Space was severely limited by the Christmas merchandise, already taking up half the aisle. And there were no audio offerings. Unfortunately, the days of sound effects albums and cheesy cover versions of "Monster Mash" on CDs are long gone.
There were, however, glow sticks, several packages of grease and cream makeup, fake fangs, and tubes of vampire blood—all similar to the kinds sold when I was a kid. These would do just fine for any kid planning a homemade monster movie.
At the very least, there was a decent selection of candy. And this store had some pretty good discounts. (After all the markdowns I came away with several bags for $15.) For some things, you can still depend on the Halloween aisle.
Halloween, 1989. The holiday was on a Tuesday that year, as it is this year. It was surely one of my most awkward Halloweens.
I was in eighth grade. Tim Burton's first Batman movie was the biggest blockbuster that summer, and was still my favorite movie when autumn rolled around. By October, I had decided to be the Joker for Halloween. Around the middle of the month, I dressed as the character for a youth group costume party at church.
Although I don't remember where I bought the face makeup, it was probably at the local Sav-on Drugs. It was pretty cheap stuff as I recall, because the white paint dried out quickly and was thoroughly cracked by the end of the night. Of course, I painted my mouth into a wide red grin a la Jack Nicholson, and sprayed my head with green hairspray. (Using hairspray was nothing out of the ordinary for me back then!) For the costume, I wore black jeans along with a button-up shirt that had a small checked or plaid pattern colored with purple and/or green—the closest thing in my closet to a Jokeresque outfit.
That night, my younger sister went out trick-or-treating with her friends. My older brother was at home, hoping to watch Night of the Living Deadon television—probably on the popular show Night Flight—but Mom didn't approve of the subject matter. After a long workday, Dad was probably resting on the couch between trips to the front door to hand out treat bags.
We had put up several cardboard decorations inside and out, from the "HAPPY HALLOWEEN" sign on a closet door to the smiling paper pumpkin hung outside the front door. We had a carved pumpkin lit up on the front porch outside, but also a pumpkin inside the foyer on which my brother drew the face of Mad Magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman.
Just outside our side door into the garage, I set up a large ghost figure I'd constructed a couple weeks earlier. The head was a basketball covered in black electrical tape and fitted with a long blond wig. The body was a simple wooden contraption covered with a white sheet. I vaguely recall it having at least one moveable arm. I somehow thought that this figure would be visible to trick-or-treaters on the sidewalk near our house. But since only the head was visible from outside the fence, I doubt anyone saw it but me.
Mom drove me around the neighborhood in our Dodge Caravan so that I could trick-or-treat. Wanting to document the trip, I took along our large camcorder and made a few shots out the passenger window. Street lamps and objects in the car's headlights occasionally light up the shadowy video, though it remains pretty dark throughout. However, I captured a fairly good shot of the front of one neighborhood home, with its warm jack-o-lantern faces, yellow porch light, and softly glowing windows.
By the time we returned home, an episode of Matlock ("The Star," which pays tribute to horror films of old) was playing on TV. My sister had come home as well, and we sat by the fireplace in the living room, examining our bags of sweet Halloween loot.
As an eighth grader, it was one of the last times I trick-or-treated for myself. I enjoyed the holiday in my own introverted way, though it was a far cry from the excitement of earlier times, such as Halloween 1982 when I dressed as the Incredible Hulk. But now I experience the excitement of Halloween in a different way—as a father. As the leaves pile up and the nights grow chilly, I anticipate walking my sons along the streets of our neighborhood and up to those warmly-lit front porches.
