'My Unusual Childhood Halloweens Shaped Who I Am'

It's Halloween, and I've been thinking a lot about 10 year old me and my reactions to the traditional movie scenes from this spooky annual holiday. Children are roaming around the highly decorated streets in their costumes with jack-o'-lantern buckets or pillowcases full of candy.

They go from house to house on foot, skipping the ones with less-than-desirable candy offerings. Later in the evening, they might compare hauls or work together with their friends to avoid the bullies who will steal their candy or their witch's hat or ghoul mask. My Halloweens as a child looked quite different.

Even though 86 percent of the population in the U.S. lives in suburban or urban areas where this scene is logistically possible, or at the very least within a close driving distance, there are some of us who cannot see ourselves in these stories.

Halloween costumes and trick-or-treating

I grew up in a small town in northern Minnesota with a population of about sixty people. The roads are dirt, and there is exactly one stop sign. The closest place to buy milk or gas is twelve miles away—but you'll pay a premium at this small corner store, if it's even open. The nearest big box store for essentials is a sixty-mile drive past forests and lakes. Watch out for the tiny white eyes of a deer, especially at dawn and dusk.

So how is my Halloween story different? Let's start with the most obvious difference in my story: it's cold in Minnesota. Do you know how hard it is to put angel wings over a snow suit? I do. According to issues of Farmer's Almanac—a favorite of my father—the high temperature on October 31 in my childhood ranged from 28.4 degrees in 2002 to 69.7 degrees in 1999, though most often falling in the mid-40s. This means you could either be a snow queen with a fabulous warm robe or a sun-loving spring animal, depending on the year. No matter what you were to be for Halloween, your costume must be adaptable. Each year, I was regaled with stories about the Halloween snow storm of 1991 where the highest temperature was a chilly 33.2 degrees that meant everyone's costumes needed to be reworked to support winter gear.

While a typical Halloween scene might have costumed kids flooding neighborhoods on a collective mission to secure candy, I rarely saw another child while trick-or-treating. Instead, I rode with my father in pick-up from house to house. It was too far and too cold to walk, even to the closest neighbor's house. I would sit in the passenger seat, after clambering up into the truck with all the complexities of childhood costumes. If I was lucky, my father would let me listen to a Halloween themed cassette tape, but most of the time it was old country songs. Either way, I was filled with anticipation for the joy of showing my neighbors, all of whom we knew, my costume and gathering up the treats.

The local resort owners always gave king sized candy bars right out of the lodge store, and selecting one out of the glass case without exchanging any money always felt like you were getting away with something. One of my favorites stops was an elderly woman named Dot, who gave out homemade caramel popcorn balls and a can of pop. I remember sitting on her front porch, legs swinging and dangling from my chair, as I protected my popcorn ball from her small dog while my father and she caught up on the local weather forecast.

Halloween and Christmas combine

Now, there were other houses with no one waiting at the front door to give out candy. Instead, we would see that all the lights were on in the garage, and perhaps there was some smoke coming out of the chimney. We would find our way to the garage.

After opening the side door, we were met with a very specific, pungent, and yet familiar smell: balsam. As we walked inside the garage, we were confronted with piles of balsam boughs, stacks of metal rings, and family members with heavy work gloves at small heavy machines. Instead of having the night off to focus on costumes and candy for Halloween, families were in their garages making Christmas wreaths.

Most of us don't think much about the journey of our fresh holiday wreaths, many of the festive decorations start their voyage in small northern Minnesota towns. Before any wreaths can be put together, the season starts with the collection of balsam boughs just after the second hard frost. This often happens early October but can start as soon as late September. Waiting until after the second frost allows the needles to be retained through the holiday season, otherwise they may all fall off in the journey from forest to front door.

For many teens in northern Minnesota, cutting and selling boughs is their very first job. Boughs for wreaths are cut from the bottom portion of balsam trees to allow for growth into the coming years. For much of the Fall, I would see my neighbors riding around on four-wheelers with small trailers for the cutting and collection of boughs. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) regulates the collection of boughs to ensure the future health and production of trees. Cutting boughs on public lands requires a permit, but many are able to cut and collect boughs from their own land.

From there, the journey continues to bough purchasers who buy from the bough pickers. The bough purchasers may make the boughs into wreaths themselves, typically in their garages, or they may sell them to larger companies.Nowadays, bough buyers purchase boughs for around $.20 per pound, depending on the quality. This means a very hard day of bough picking, which may bring in around 1,000 pounds, will yield the picker about $200. That can go a long way in supporting a family.

Larger holiday wreath companies contract with Minnesota families to produce wreaths using the freshly picked boughs. When I was a child and teen, to make a wreath, one must have arranged the boughs in bunches along a metal hoop and used a machine with a handle to close the metal tines that hold the boughs in place. I'm not sure if each individual wreath needs to be made by hand today. When I was a child, we knew families who could gross up to $20,000 a year by making wreaths in their garages. After the wreaths are made, they are transferred to a larger company's processing facility where finishing touches, such as bows and ribbon and pinecones are added.

Community in the holiday season

In an analysis of non-timber forest products, researchers at the University of Minnesota argue that balsam bough harvesting should be understood as a form of cultural economy that isn't just about making money but a way of life. A bough harvester interviewed for the study noted that it was a way for families to spend time together. Others said that they enjoyed spending time out in the woods, as many who live in Northern Minnesota do.

There was something very special, yet jarring, about finding your way from the cold, crisp darkness of the forest lined roads into the warm, welcoming, and bright garages, filled with holiday smells and families working together, sharing coffee poured out of thermos canisters.

As I reflect, the other peculiar feature of my Halloween experience is that throughout the rest of the year, I would visit neighbor's houses all the time with my father, so their houses and spaces were familiar. Each morning, he visited his friends for coffee. Roy and Caroline were the first and most consistent house because they got up earliest, before my father would start his work for the day. Once you entered the garage on those chilly Halloween nights and completed the requisite candy collection we relaxed into our daily rhythm of working and discussing the latest news: what's the weather going to be like and where will the biggest deer be this coming hunting season?

My family didn't make commercial wreaths, though we always made our own for our front door, so perhaps this is why this particular aspect of Halloween sticks out to me so fully. I remember so clearly taking candy from gloved-hands, sticky from the balsam, the sound of metal crunching and machines working, and the stacks of finished wreaths. I remember the ease at which Minnesotans, at many times throughout the year and at all times of day, worked closely with the land and with each other. We harvested wild rice, rhubarb, wild berries, and game from the forest in the practice of life, not as a special occasion.

In these moments in the garage on Halloween, I forgot about the costumes and the candy I'd seen in Halloween movies and marveled at the collective work being completed and the long journey that awaited these wreaths. It felt like a secret window into the life of these decorations, so vital to our movie images of the holidays. And maybe I remember this Halloween experience so vividly because so few of us get to witness this culture of connection to the land and working together that then spreads holiday cheer across homes and doors across the United States as we say, "Trick or treat?"

When I think about what we need in our lives this holiday—and election—season, I remember the reliable, slow yet steady pace of northern Minnesota and strive to embody the practice of collective work toward a common goal. To me, that means family,—both given and chosen—coffee, and Halloween candy.

Lacey J. Davidson is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Indianapolis. She organizes for transformative community change with Indiana Task FORCE (Feminists Organizing and Reimagining Civic Engagement) and is a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project.

All views expressed in this article are the author's own.