OCTOBER 30: Daddy’s Hallowe’en
“I am going to tell you,” said daddy, “of the things I did when I was a boy at Hallowe’en time. First of all I used to love bobbing in a tub for apples. I wore a bathing cap so if it was a cold evening my mother wouldn’t be afraid I’d get my hair wet and catch cold because she knew how far down I’d dive into the tub of water!
“And we all did the same. The girls needed the bathing caps on their heads more than the boys did and they certainly could dive with hair all held in so dry and safe by their caps.
“Then we would play games and one of our favorite games was to run races carrying peanuts on knives.
“Two at a time would race against each other. The end of the race would be a big bowl set on the floor and we would start off at the other end of the room.
“Then we would each have a lot of peanuts and we would carry as many as we could on our knife until we had gotten rid of all of them.
“We had to take all the peanuts to the bowl without letting any drop off.
“It was most exciting, for though none of the other children could push us or joggle us they could make funny remarks to us and we would start laughing and sometimes our knife would shake and we’d drop the peanuts and have to start all over again.
“Sometimes we would only take one at a time because we could get them all to the bowl more quickly that way in the long run.
“Sometimes the one who starts off fastest does not win, you know. And then of course we went calling each with a Jack O’Lantern, and how mad we were at those who hadn’t enough fun in them to like these Hallowe’en callers!”