Halloween looms with memories of old 'tricks'

Trick or treat
Originally uploaded by Brite light photos.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - The air has gotten cold here in Sacramento, but the stores are full of Halloween candy -- all those boxes of chocolate and now virtually indigestible stuff that we soooo craved when we wandered around Halloween night as teenagers.

What I remember most about the Halloween season though, were the sometimes funny, sometimes not-so-funny, tricks that we played for the week or two before (and sometimes the week or two after).

The easy one was soaping windows of houses and even screens. For some reason I don't remember soaping windows on any cars. I'm sure we did. If you were feeling mean, using a candle to 'wax' a window did pretty much the same thing, except getting wax out of a screen was real pain and getting wax off windows sometime required scraping.

More than a few people found their tires pretty flat when they left for work in the morning. Some cars wouldn't start because of the potatoes stuffed up their tailpipes.

One Halloween season we borrowed a stop sign and placed it in various people's front lawns. We would lurk in the bushes and watch people coming to a screeching halt right in the middle of West Summit Avenue where a stop sign had so mysteriously appeared.

People driving by never seemed to take much notice of three or four teenage miscreants carrying a stop sign down the street on a wooden pole.

We moved more than a few cars around, too, though on at least on occasion I remember moving a car on a hill, pushing it, and had it get away from us, nearly landing in a creek.

Another favorite was borrowing the flashing yellow lights that the public works department put on top of those metal sawhorses at construction sites.

Anyone ever filled a paper bag with dog crap, put in on a front porch and then lit it on fire?

And toilet papering a house! Gawd that fun, especially the looks you got earlier at Super Duper, buying a six pack of toilet paper and a dozen eggs for the evening's activities.

Of course, had any of my four children done any of this stuff, I would have locked them in the house a heartbeat.

Halloween is pretty tame here in California, trick-wise, anyway. I think more adults get dressed up and get crazy than kids, especially around the university. All the bars have competitions for the best costumes and it seems that the raunchier they are, the better.

I already did my dressing up two weeks ago in a tuxedo, doing a passable imitiation of a waiter at a restaurant. I think this year I'll sit home with a basket of candy (small Chunky candy bars) for the half-dozen or so neighborhood kids who will come by early, then wait for the toilet papering after dark.