Friday Five On Halloween

Here are the Friday Five questions for today.

1. What was your first Halloween costume?

I have no idea. How about the first Halloween costume that I remember? When I was in the sixth grade (mid 50s) I was a safety patrol. For rainy days the school supplied wonderful light colored flowing cape style raincoats with hoods. I remember talking our advisor into letting my friend and me borrow two of these raincapes to use as ghost costumes on Halloween. I think it helped that my friend's dad was the sixth grade teacher.

This costume was wonderful because it solved the annual conflict created by having a wonderful Halloween costume and then having to wear a coat over it. In SW Michigan it is traditional for it to rain and/or sleet and/or snow on Halloween.

In case you are wondering, it is raining as I write. But it is too warm to have sleet or snow, so that is better than other years.

2. What was your best costume and why?

My best costume was for Hoe-Down Day, not Halloween. Hoe-Down Day was a homecoming week event at Marshall High School. My freshman year I went as an alien. I dressed in green and used green food coloring on all my exposed skin. Several of my teachers recalled this costume years after I graduated.

3. Did you ever play a trick on someone who didn't give you a treat?

I don't remember any time when I didn't get a treat except for the people who weren't home or didn't want it to look like they were home. I've always been a rather peace loving, law-biding person. Plus I was too busy eating candy to bother with playing tricks.

4. Do you have any Halloween traditions? (ie: Family pumpkin carving, special dinner before trick or treating, etc.)

Halloween is not a special holiday for us. We live way way in the country and never have had a Trick or Treater visit us. I do have a very bright orange turtleneck that I wear to work on Halloween with black chinos. That's the best I can do.

5. Share your favorite scary story...real or legend!

I can't lick an envelope without thinking of the story my friend Russ told me about someone who licked an envelope and then "hatched" a cockroach from her tongue.

Supposedly while licking an egg-infested glue strip on an envelope, she got a paper cut. The cut got "infected". When she went to the hospital to have it examined the doctor made an incision to release the pus and a roach crawled out.

Happy Halloween!