Sub Terra Vita Chronicle #21—Hallowed These Traditions: Remembering All Saints Eve in Osceola

Sub Terra Vita

By Tim Krenz

October 19, 2015

Chronicle #21—Hallowed These Traditions: Remembering All Saints Eve in Osceola

On that October 31^st every year, little cloaked ghosts, goblins, and ghouls wandered in the feckless pursuit of fun, mischief, and above all, candy in the buckets and bags we expectantly carried. On the chilly Autumn nights of the years as a youngster in Osceola, our little gang from the topside of town, around the water tower park above the railroad tracks, reveled in the merriment of costumes, tricks, dares, and youth in pursuit of the ultimate milk chocolates and sour candies.

Even before starting kindergarten, Halloween parties, as now, formed the norm. My cousin on Gerald Street, across the Third Avenue gulch from my house, hosted parties in the family room basement, presented and entertained by our sisters. The neighborhood guys and girls, and the friends from the country, excited in our outfits of clowns, cowboys, angels, and of course, ghosts, Dracula, and Monstersteins. We wowed in the cotton-pulled spider webs and paper cutouts of skeletons, as we carved pumpkins with little skills in arts of variety. Another memorable party, at the houses at the top of Sledding Hill, we really did play such games as pinning tails, whacking pinatas, and bobbing for apples, the latter in real, old, tin wash basins—which people now call antiques. Legends of those wash tubs persist in the age of rubberized storage crates, of course.

Walking the neighborhoods topside and downtown, and overside again, uphill all three ways, incidentally, we wore thin cheap polyester throw-away superhero and villain capes and suits, capped by very flimsy, thin, weak plastic masks of smiling cartoon figures, and all of this accouterments held together by thin and weak stapled rubber-elastic strings. We did not have the super-foam costumes of current Hollywood movies. G.I. outfits came from dads' grab bags of their service days before our birth.

Walking the nights, not walking the dead, but more like kids off the leash, I remember a friend from the old gang, who kept egging the rest of us in a whisper to, “Smash the pumpkin, quick. Knock it off the rail.” He would not do it. Neither did we, as one lady gave us generous handfuls of chocolate bars, while admonishing us, politely, to our shame, “Don't break my pumpkins.” She said it with a smile. Other things, like the Haunted House at the old classic Skelly Gas station, still present at the corner of Cascade Street and Second Avenue, also weigh well and remain worth remembering. All good fun had to end, and then the transition between childhood and graduation came, far too early to usefully party small or live large.

In those odd, pre-teen years, the dad of my best friend, Paul, took Paul and I to the beautiful brick Baptist Church (still standing, on the corner of Third Avenue and Cascade Street) on Halloween night, where we sat in the pews, ate the spreads of snacks, and watched Disney movies. We saw in a succession of years, movies shown on portable screens, illuminated by real film projectors, the classics of good story, not gore and senseless cruelty. Who remembers film projectors may also remember The Cat From Witch Mountain and Escape from Outer Space, or does that not sound familiar to fading memories?

Far from zombies and the allure of romantic vampires, one of the best Halloween stories, Disney's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, recalls more simple context to what I really miss about youth, and what we all miss in adulthood: Things that show and tell a good story, about living in the Valley, at any age, not to lament its passing, but to build on the present so the future feels normal. In that, have a safe and fulfilling Halloween next week. Plan to have spontaneous fun, if all else fails, and share the story of your time doing it, and living here, now, both young and older.