As a kid I loved Halloween, but grownups have co-opted it.
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When did Halloween evolve into such a huge deal? I have a hard time remembering much about Halloween from my childhood. Perhaps that’s because I am trying to recall memories from 65 years ago. Once, I asked my mother what costumes I wore for Halloween, and she informed me that it really wasn’t that important when I was a kid. In fact, she didn’t think I went trick or treating until we moved to the suburbs in the 1952.

I do remember my younger brothers dressing up as … hobos. How’s that for politically incorrect and a total throw back to another era? I doubt kids today have ever heard that word, which is a good thing. My mother would make mustaches for them with blackened cork and tie a bandana filled with newspaper to a stick. I’m pretty sure I went with them as babysitter, which was no costume at all. I did host one Halloween party as a teen and remember dressing as a doll. No comments please. Those were different times.

By the time I had three kids of my own, Halloween was a holiday that required costumes and mandatory trick or treating. Luckily for me, the costumes didn’t have to be elaborate. Plastic ones were all the rage. I think my son went as a generic Chicago Bears player for multiple years. Just a jersey and helmet – so simple. My daughters were figure skaters and, being a practical mom, they repurposed costumes from prior ice shows.

We decorated our house by carving one pumpkin and putting it in the front window, lit with a candle. My kids got to wear their costumes to school, at least when they were younger. And they went trick or treating to neighbors’ homes. That was it. The whole thing took up a day to choose the costume (except for my son – he didn’t even have to think about it) and a day to carve the pumpkin.

Fast forward to my grandkids’ generation. Halloween is quite a production. Costumes need to be considered months ahead and ordered online if there is not an acceptable one at Target or a Halloween store. Plastic is out, and my grandsons would never be happy being a generic anything. So, this year, we will have a ninja or two, Harry Potter, Glinda from Wicked, and others that could be described as simply creepy. My kids don’t spend a fortune on these (they easily could), but the planning consumes a lot of time.

 

 

Then there is the issue of decorating the house and carving the pumpkin. Driving down one of my daughter’s blocks, I see every house decked out with spider webs, spiders, skeletons, a few witches (LOL – shouldn’t they be called Wiccans these days?), ghosts, scarecrows, graves, and other creepy creatures. The Halloween-Industrial Complex must be in seventh heaven. And one pumpkin is no longer enough. Each home is graced with several and some are decorated with spray paint, elaborate designs, and intricate carvings. You can Google this or look on Pinterest or YouTube for thousands of ideas.

Then there’s trick or treating, which used to be pretty simple. You got a lot of candy and you ate it. But now it’s hard to decide if it’s safe to take candy from folks you don’t know. And you rarely see kids going from house to house without parents accompanying them. So even this aspect of Halloween has become more complicated.

There’s a part of me that loves Halloween. Every year, I want photos of my grandkids in their costumes. They look so cute. But part of me wishes Halloween were less demanding of my kids’ limited time. And another part of me wishes that Halloween, like every major holiday, was a bit less commercialized and costly.

Do I sound like the Halloween Grinch? Well, that’s who I am when a simple children’s holiday has become another opportunity for stores to sell outrageous amounts of merchandise to children and now to adults as well. Halloween has become an expensive excuse for bad taste, excessive partying, and competition to produce the coolest costume. Here’s to remembering simpler times when the only controversy surrounding Halloween was if your parents let you horde your candy or made you eat it quickly to get it over with. Trick or treat!

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I always burst into tears when we turned the corner and I could see the big Tudor house in a nice section of Detroit where Dr. Himelhoch also had his office. I was sure it meant I would get a shot in my rear end, a painful and humiliating experience.

Joseph Himelhoch was a large man with a white brush cut, thick black eyebrows and black-rimmed glasses. His wife, Sally, was his nurse. I have no idea how long they’d been married but my mother told me that Sally had converted to Judaism before they married. Dr. Himelhoch was a Reform Jew, but deeply committed to the religion. I’m sure he was a good, caring pediatrician, but his loud voice frightened me. He spent time with my brother and me at our annual exams and took great interest in both of us. He loved classical music, the arts and our family. My older brother Rick was devoted to music, even at a young age and the doctor joked that he’d been vaccinated with a record needle (a refreshing vaccination joke, and one that only people who know about turntables will understand)!

The Reform Jewish movement was VERY liberal in the late 1940s and early 1950s when I came along. Confirmation in 10th grade, rather than bar mitzvah at age 13 (girls definitely did not have bat mitzvahs yet) was the big thing at the time and my brother was not being prepared for his bar mitzvah. Dr. Himelhoch objected. I remember he said, “What happens if he grows up and wants to become a rabbi?” (The joke is: my brother DID grow up to become a rabbi.)

So, at about age 12, my brother began private tutoring in Hebrew and all the customs necessary for his bar mitzvah. Also at that time, our family began saying the blessings for Shabbat on Friday nights and going to Temple almost every Friday night (our Temple didn’t have services on Saturday mornings. Bar mitzvahs were conducted on Friday nights as well). And my brother was so smart and dedicated to learning, that his ceremony was only delayed by three months. We celebrated his bar mitzvah on Friday, May 5, 1961. My parents had a big party on Saturday night at a downtown hotel with an orchestra for dancing. I’m sure that Dr. and Mrs. Himelhoch were invited, but my brother must have those photos. I was eight years old and wore pink organdy. Eventually, my father became an officer of the Temple. Because of Dr. Himelhoch’s intervention, Judaism became a big part of our lives.

I was a sickly little kid. I was small, never weighed much and always got an annual case of the flu. I’d be in bed, throwing up for a week, with a bucket on a stool along side my bed. Mother also set up a small table next to my bed on which she placed some sustenance for me. On it, I also kept a photo of my favorite cousin, Connie. I’d been a flower girl in her wedding. Just looking at that photo made me happy and helped me feel better.

My mother would call Dr. Himelhoch, who would come to the house in the evening, after office hours. Of course he had his black doctor’s bag with him. He’d listen to my chest, take my temperature, advise me to drink fluids. He told my mother to serve me hot tea with lemon and honey. To this day, I can’t stand the smell or taste of black tea; a true sense aversion dating back to my days of throwing up. I would try to ingest some, but, since I didn’t like the taste of it, it frequently make me MORE nauseous. He would threaten that if I didn’t take in some fluids, I’d land in the hospital (I would eat Campbell’s chicken soup).

After checking on the patient, he’d sit with my parents in our living room (never the den), in the big wing chair in the corner of the room. Dad would offer him a drink (perhaps some schnapps) and the adults would sit and talk about weighty matters for some time. It was during one of those talks that the decision about my brother’s bar mitzvah was determined. I don’t remember if my mother was always present. Perhaps they talked some politics as well. I could hear their voices rise and fall. As I mentioned, Dr. Himelhoch had a loud voice. And we had a small, three bedroom house at the time.

But Dr. Himelhoch was not a well man. He was overweight. I believe he’d already had one heart attack. His wife, nurse Sally, fretted over him. I looked online for information about him, but only found a reference to them in the society pages, no death notice. Yet I know he died before my 12th birthday, as I had another pediatrician by the time I entered puberty. I believe he had a fatal heart attack and that put an end to the long family chats he had when he came around for house calls. We mourned his loss.