Reply #43: I'm sure that's true and it's doubly depressing. [View All]

I grew up in a very small town (more of a post-office designation than a town) in SW VA - very red, very Bible Belt--and yet Halloween was a HUGE deal when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s. My elementary school cut all classes that afternoon and turned every classroom into a different 'theme' room - there were games, jack'o'lantern carving, a crawl-through 'haunted house', a costume contest, a veritable orgy of candy corn and pumpkin pie and cupcakes with black cats and ghosties and stuff. All the teachers dressed up. And just about everybody went trick or treating - houses were far apart of course, so parents signed up to drive gaggles of kids around. Anybody who didn't give out candy got the stinkeye, and sometimes the TP.

It was a high point of our year. There were a very few kids who didn' tparticipate for religious reasons--mostly the hardline Pentecostal kids, who stood out anyway because the girls weren't allowed to cut their hair or wear pants--and we all felt just awful for them. We used to give them some of our candy on the sly.