Trick or treating with our granddaughters last week had sort of a Mardi Gras flavor to it.
There were even a few things about the experience that reminded me of trick or treating as a kid. Except I didn’t see any S’mores or popcorn balls.
They live in a sprawling neighborhood where kids pile up on golf carts or flat bed trailers and go house-to-house for goodies.
It is not necessary to go door-to-door, because adults are sitting along the road waiting for them with heaps of treats. So the kids just go driveway-to-driveway.
I had some flashbacks to Mardi Gras celebrations when I was working in New Orleans and had to weave through blocks of chaos and commotion to get to the newspaper office.
The trick or treating parade was on a much smaller scale, but there were masks, painted faces, golf carts decorated with flashing lights and trailers loaded with revelers like Mardi Gras floats.
There were no beads or doubloons flying around the best I could tell, but I did see some Twizzlers and Peanut Butter Cups in flight as they were traded from one plastic pumpkin container to another.
Kids that I know and see all the time at my granddaughters’ schools and ball games were unrecognizable in mummy, witch, and ghost outfits.
My own granddaughters, who would normally be grounded for putting on a smidge of lipstick, were covered with face paint, glitter, mascara, and eye shadow and looked like walking makeup kits.
They were Dracula, Jasmine, and Cinderella. I never saw a Superman cape, Batman mask or rubber Frankenstein head cover like boys wore when I was growing up.
And nobody was handing out the kind of treats that we lined up for on neighbors’ front porches in those days. We even went home and changed costumes so we could go back for seconds.
We could count every year on getting some homemade popcorn balls at the Honeycutts’ house, hot chocolate with marshmallows floating in it from the Cains and caramel apples from Mrs. Adams.
But our favorite stop was always the Rogers’ house. She was a troop leader for the local Girl Scouts and introduced us to those S’mores treats made with graham crackers, marshmallows, and melted chocolate.
Girls in our classes who were involved in Girl Scouts used to tell us about S’mores. I asked my mother once to make us some, and she said, “That’s a Girl Scout thing.”
It might have violated Girl Scout rules for Mrs. Rogers to make them for us every Halloween, but she did. We sat on her porch to enjoy them, because marshmallow and chocolate dripped down our arms if we tried to eat them while we were walking.
There were plenty of other old-fashioned treats that folks handed out for Halloween back then like Mars, O’Henry and Zagnut candy bars, those three-color coconut bars that were strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla flavored and Dubble Bubble chewing gum.
When my kids were little, we built a fire in the empty lot next door on Halloween night and toasted marshmallows and roasted wieners for hot dogs for trick or treaters.
After we ran out, as we always did, they got Tootsie Rolls and those little Chunky candy bars with peanuts and raisins. I handed out the Tootsie Rolls first hoping to have some Chunky bars left over for myself.
I was impressed with the treats that my granddaughters and other kids got in their neighborhood. There was good candy like Twix, Snickers, Butterfinger, and Baby Ruth. At one house, they even handed out those Capri Sun fruit drinks. I liked the wild cherry.
Nobody was roasting hot dogs last week, but there was a big pot of gumbo back home when we finished and a couple of Milky Ways from a plastic pumpkin container for dessert.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES