As you know, Halloween (Oct 31) will be here in a week and a half.  Since it falls on a Monday evening, there’s no karate training that day.  Our younger members will be eagerly walking in their neighborhoods, bag in hand;, while our older members will be passing out candies from their front doors.  Anyways, the only karate gi’s that might appear at Momilani Community Center that evening would be trick-or-treaters in costume. BTW, each year, PCF holds a large celebration there that is fun and safe to attend, if you’re so inclined.

Events like these sometimes make me reminisce  – as fading memories of scores of past Halloweens pop up in my mind.  The earliest I can recall was around 1956 and the one thing that I can clearly remember was that the folks at one house actually gave me my first candied apple!  I mean, a whole apple on a stick, covered in caramel, upside down on a paper plate.  Fortunately, I was only a couple of houses away from home, so I hurried back and took two or three bites of the tasty but gooey and messy treat; washed my hands/mouth and rushed back out to rejoin my friends.  Back then, I wondered how many scores of apples they had to prepare, for the hordes of tiny visitors haha.  Thinking about it now, I’m pretty sure that they prepared just a few of these special treats, set aside for those neighborhood kids that they knew well.

I’m also pretty sure that you won’t be giving out nor receiving  any candied apples this Halloween, but I do wonder whatever happened to some of the other sweet treats I enjoyed back in the 1950’s.  My favorites included: candied necklaces, candy buttons on paper, banana Turkish taffy, cigarette gum/plastic guns that could shoot candy into your mouth (can you believe it?), jawbreakers (probably a choking hazard), and “soda pop” drinks in soft wax shaped like soda bottles.  I’d often see these empty wax containers, littering the roadways, melted and flattened, sometimes with tire tracks imprinted on the soft wax.  There was one particular candy (or was it a health supplement?) that I really liked but rarely possessed  –  Horlicks Malted Milk Tablets (I heard that these gave you energy!).  The light tan Horlicks tablets came in small, glass flasks.  Adults might let the tablets slowly melt in their mouths, but I loved to chew them and they’d really get stuck in my teeth.  We’d fill the empty flasks with water and tuck one in our pocket while we played “cowboy”. Then we’d take swigs of “whiskey” from them and “smoked” our cigarette gum; mirroring unhealthy habits we watched at western movies.  As it turns out, the tablets weren’t candies in the truest sense at all.  Apparently their origin was associated with the baby food malted milk industry.   In fact, when they were originally sold in pharmacies and touted as health supplements. Soldiers were encouraged to carry them into the field.  By the 1960’s, the Horlicks tablets had all but disappeared.

Okayl I’ve meandered enough about the lost sweet treats of my childhood and Halloween, haha.  I wish all of our younger members a nice evening (hopefully good weather) of trick-or-treating and that our older members don’t run out of candies to hand out to the youngsters before the night is over.  And, as a sign of the times, I’m sure that parents will carefully check each goodie that their child comes back with – though I doubt that they’ll find a sticky candied apple in the bag.