Today in Halloween: Trick or treat for UNICEF

A lot of us remember those orange boxes.

When I was a kid, I trick-or-treated at least a couple of times for UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund.

Begun in 1950, the practice of collecting spare change while you’re making your Halloween rounds – often in place of collecting candy, adding a further altruistic element to the event – has helped children around the world.

More than $188 million has been raised by trick-or-treaters to help provide food or clean water around the world. Donations also helped victims of Hurricane Katrina in the US.

Check out trickortreatforunicef.org.

Today in Halloween: Don’t be like Calvin’s dad

Because I need some Calvin and Hobbes today.

Thank you Bill Watterson.

Here’s the home of Calvin and Hobbes on the web.

Today in Halloween: Family Circus, is that you?

I happened upon this tonight and thought I would post it even though I don’t know the story behind it yet.

But hey: Halloween.

Regular readers of this blog know there’s some fascination out there for Bil Keane’s Family Circus newspaper comic panel. A lot of people come to the blog looking for Billy – or is it Jeffy? – and his circuitous route through town, always marked by a twisting dotted line.

So I found this intriguing. I can’t find much in the way of explanations that make me believe that Keane’s panel was called Family-Go-Round before it was Family Circus.

So I’m wondering if this wasn’t some weird aberration. It happens.

Anyway, here, purportedly from 1960, is Bil Keane’s take on trick-or-treating.

Today in Halloween: Razor blades in apples

It’s possible it never happened, but it’s too good a story to resist. Some madman in some city – maybe one not all that far away from your own – slipped a razor blade into an apple given out one Halloween to a trick-or-treater. The kid bit into it and the razor blade lodged firmly in the roof of his mouth. Ouch!

Since I was a child, the rumors of razor blades in apples has been one that haunted kids – but even more so their parents – every Halloween. Parents insisted on inspecting the contents of the trick-or-treat bag for tampered-with apples and candy before kids were let loose to indulge their Halloween gluttony.

Some hospitals even offered free x-raying of Halloween candy to make sure no foreign objects were included. I’m not sure if the irradiated candy was any more dangerous than the unscreened treats.

You know it’s a “real” urban legend when there’s a Snopes.com page dedicated to the subject, encompassing razor blades and the equally insidious pins and needles in apples and candy.

Perhaps surprisingly, Snopes quotes an expert, Professor Joel Best, who says he’s confirmed about 80 cases of sharp objects in Halloween treats since 1959.

I guess if your chances are 80 in … how many billion? … treats given out over the years, you’re probably pretty safe.

By the way, Best wrote a 1985 paper, “The Razor Blade in the Apple: The Social Construction of Urban Legends,” that is available for download.

Interestingly, Snopes notes that poisoned candy was the fear from the post-war years until the mid-1960s, when sharp objects became the thing that parents could obsess about.

Today in Halloween: Scaring trick-or-treaters

Because I lived in the country when I was growing up, I’d venture into the city and go trick-or-treating every Halloween with my cousins and some friends, who lived in a densely-populated part of town with what seemed like a bazillion trick-or-treaters.

Seriously, you almost couldn’t make your way down the sidewalk without tripping over some other pint-size goblin or superhero.

We did it every year, but one year in particular stands out in my memory.

My cousin, friends and I made our way from house-to-house, like we always did. I was at a disadvantage, as always, because of my mask. I’m pretty sure this year it was a cheap rubber monster mask of some kind, but the disadvantage came in because I had to wear it over my glasses.

As a kid who got glasses in the middle of first grade, I had grown accustomed to all the drawbacks of being a four eyes. But one of the worst was how anything that covered your nose and face – winter weather knit ski masks, for example, but especially Halloween masks – would make my glasses fog up.

So I was flying blind. Or walking blind.

My group walked up the sidewalk to a house much like every other house we had visited that night. But this one was different.

Inside lived someone who loved Halloween very much. That or a sadist who hated kids.

As we drew near the door, someone on the front porch pulled a rope and a dummy fell out of a tree in front of us. It was obviously a stuffed figure but freaked us out anyway. We turned to run.

But they weren’t done with us yet. The homeowner had stationed friends or, most likely, teenage offspring, behind bushes and trees in the front yard. As we beat a hasty retreat they popped out at us, yelling and growling.

We all ran like crazy. Some of us missed the sidewalk and burst out into the nearby street. Luckily cars were moving along at a crawl because of all the kids who were out.

I’ve never forgotten that night. I still think of it when I’m walking my son through our neighborhood and somebody has obviously replaced a stuffed figure in a porch chair with a living, breathing person, ready to jump at us.

It’s fun to be scared on Halloween. A little bit.