Who Are You?

When I was a young girl, Halloween costumes were pretty tame. Where I grew up it was winter cold by Halloween, so costumes pretty much had to be recognizable by just the mask, because the rest of it was covered up with a sweatshirt, jacket, mittens and hat. A lot of the time, mine was supplemented with long johns and snow pants under my skirt. Most of the neighborhood kids just wore one of those flimsy plastic masks held on over the ears with a flimsier piece of elastic that broke before the night was finished. The masks looked like Princess Leia or Roy Rogers or Trigger.

I’ll never forget the year I had a mask that looked like the Devil. It was cool because the outside was a metallic gold, but the inside was red, so any little bit of illumination gave it a fiery look. I remember it best because after Halloween, my brother put it on upside down, so that the eye holes were over his mouth. He got disoriented, tripped and backed into the corner of my dresser where he cut open the back of his head and had to go to the Emergency Room for stitches. He made me throw it away after that because he thought the mask was evil. Hmmmm. Let’s examine the facts. Over the years, my clumsy little brother had his head stitched up about four times, broke his leg, and cut his hand on an axe. Evil mask? I think not.

One of the other costume options my friends often used was to poke eyeholes in an old white bed sheet and become a ghost. That didn’t happen at our house because our sheets had either flowers or stripes.  No colorful ghosts that I know about. There were a few rich people who went to the city to get a real costume, but those were kids going to a party inside, not Trick-or-Treating in the snow.

My Mom’s favorite form of torturing us at Halloween was by making us create our own masks with brown paper grocery bags colored on with crayons. Sometimes she’d let us use paper plates or aluminum pie pans to accessorize. Do you know how hard it is to use recyclables so that people can tell what you are in the glow of their porch light? “Oh! And what do we have here? A hobo perhaps?” “Hey lady, can’t you tell? I’m not wearing tin cans around my arms to look like I’m homeless. I’m a spaceman!”

My best costume was my last as a kid. After that year, my two little sisters were old enough to go Trick-or-Treating and I had to escort them with my Dad’s big flashlight—the one with a battery the size of a brick. It took both of my hands to carry it and my sisters’ loot. Anyway, that year I wore a plastic Michael Jackson mask, one silver glove, a black hat, and I carried our Coleman camp light in my outstretched hand. What was I, you ask?

I was a Jakko Lantern.

© Sue Barton 2004