I love Charlie Brown movies. They bring back such memories. The other day I was watching The Great Pumpkin and was transported back several years to when I was a little girl, watching it at my Grandma’s house while eating popcorn. Halloween has many special memories for me.
Even though I grew up in a very religious community, Halloween was celebrated. My mom would often make me and my three sisters our Halloween costumes. I remember going to the store with her looking for patterns. We’d be clowns, angels, cowgirls. Other times we would find something on our garage sale marathons during the summer. My dad was a potato and onion farmer, so it’s not like we had a ton of money to buy costumes from the local KMart; although I kind of wonder if we went to garage sales so much because it was a form of cheap entertainment. Regardless, our homemade costumes were always way better than our friends’ anyway!
About a week before Halloween we would gut out our pumpkins and roast the seeds. Only my Dad and I actually ate the seeds, but we did usually roast them. Then we would sit in the living room and make a list of everyone in the area who we knew, going by neighborhoods. There were all of our immediate neighbors, of course. Then friends from church, friends from school, our relatives, and our parent’s friends.
The afternoon of Halloween, we would walk the neighborhood (it didn’t take long, as we were out in the country). Then we’d all pile in my mom’s station wagon (Dad was usually still out in the fields harvesting potatoes). Sometimes my cousins would come with us.
Oh, the candy we ended up with! My favorites were homemade caramel apples and popcorn balls from the elderly women in our community (although I’m sure they don’t do that nowadays). Our plastic pumpkins would be overflowing, and often another plastic bag, just from visiting all the people we knew. Since we knew all the people, we didn’t have to go down to the fire station to have our candy checked.
At the end of the night my Dad would be home from harvesting, sometimes he’d have handed out candy to trick or treaters. We always had some left (our favorites, of course). We always shared with him, knowing he’d had a long day at work.
And then? We’d sit down and often watch The Great Pumpkin on TV.
How to Roast Pumpkin Seeds
Rinse and pat dry; lay on a cookie sheet in a single layer; sprinkle with salt; bake at 250F for about an hour until crisp, stirring once or twice.
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I was always stuck with those plastic costumes from the store and envious of friends whose moms made theirs!