The Halloween Aisle, Part 3

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.

The Halloween Aisle, Part 2

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. 

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!

Halloween 1989

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 Dead on 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. 

(Updated Sept. 24, 2024)