Trick-or -Treating in the 1991 Halloween Blizzard

603 words

5 minute read

The 1991 Halloween blizzard hit the upper-Midwest when I was ten years old.  It's legendary if you live anywhere the blizzard hit.  Each Halloween, I can count on at least one reference to it from fellow Midwesterners.

At ten, though, my main concern was getting to go Trick-or-Treating.  We couldn't not go.  Trick-or-Treating was Halloween as far as my siblings and I were concerned.  We were used to bundling up.  Halloween photos from years past show us seamlessly adapting to wearing costumes outside our winter jackets, so we could stay warm and Trick-or-Treat simultaneously.


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But this was a different matter.

My sister's fairy costume (which I was wearing that year) was not made to don over a jacket.  It was appropriate for a summer night out, not a trek through treacherous icy, snowy conditions in the dark, on a quest to get candy.

[Image: As I can find no photos of Halloween 1991, here's one from the previous year, where Tara is dressed in her fairy costume and I'm dressed in my most favorite costume ever.  I loved my angel costume, but felt conflicted, even as I stood posing for this picture, because I had never seen an angel with crutches before.  I felt wrong in the costume, and therefore had no qualms about switching the following year, and dressing as a fairy myself.]

But we had no choice.  If we wanted to Trick-or-Treat, we had to bundle up.  So it was winter jackets, snowpants, and boots for all.  No costumes visible.

I was carried, piggyback, to the houses.  Freezing and wishing for the experience to be over as soon as possible so Tara and I and our two younger brothers could count and sort our candy (after it was checked for various unsafe items, as was the custom in the '90s...)

We made it home and counted up the candy we'd collected.  I was always on the lookout for Reese's Peanut Butter Cups - regular sized.  No one liked Almond Joys or Mounds bars, but somehow all of us ended up with some of those.  The next few days were filled with the tradition us kids had: where we bargained with each other in order to stock up on candy we favored.  (Tara liked Starbursts.  But they weren't my favorite, for example...so she'd offer me something chocolate in exchange.)

That was my last year Trick-or-Treating - less than two months before major surgery.  I've spent the last few years wondering if we were discouraged from Trick-or-Treating anymore because of all the work it took to get me from house to house, especially the year of the blizzard.

Now that I'm an adult, I'm shocked hearing about kids who are allowed to Trick-or-Treat into high school and beyond.  When our first year of middle school, we were told we were too old.  We had to stay home and hand out candy instead.

Halloweens now are lowkey and festive in their own way.  I'll most likely find my orange jack-o-lantern shirt, or the one that reads IT'S JUST A BUNCH OF HOCUS POCUS (because of course, we must watch Hocus Pocus on Halloween...)

We don't have to worry about not getting candy, either, as we have our own.  Kept in its very own drawer in our fridge, for optimal freshness.  (We don't have a vegetable drawer, we have a chocolate drawer.  So much better.)

Happy Halloween.

P.S.  We totally do eat vegetables by the way.  We just don't keep them in the chocolate drawer  ;)

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