Happy Halloween, Sun readers
Today kicks off the holiday season in the Sun Region and especially the Old Town Seal Beach area.
It is this time of year that is always the happiest and most fun to work at what we do here at the newspaper and how we interact with the town and neighbors we serve throughout the year. With the arrival of another Halloween, I must admit that I am a little surprised at how long this journey has lasted for the paper and especially for my own history with it.
It is a funny thing about life. So many things that actually happened years ago now seem as if they occurred only yesterday.
One of those things in particular is the arrival every Halloween of the little kids dressed in their costumes, parading down Main Street, stopping at the participating merchants to collect their trick or treat candy. I will always have a personal connection to this annual event thanks to something that happened, well, it must be more than 20 years ago. But like I said, it could have been yesterday.
I was standing just inside the front door of the Sun office on Main Street when I saw the little goblins, fairies, angels, devils, spooks, monsters and super heroes begin to trickle down the opposite side of Main Street. I was particularly curious because back in the day the main group of tiny trick or treaters came from Under the Rainbow Preschool. Now, it just so happens that my daughter Casey was a “student” at the preschool from the time she was in diapers until she graduated to McGaugh Elementary School. That Halloween she was still pretty small. The school is long gone, having been demolished years ago to make way for the Zoeter Center.
How small? Well I’ll tell you. Other people who have been parents will know this too. There is a time in a child’s life when their proportions are different than what they are later on in life. At that time, Casey and her friends and classmates all kind of looked like characters out of the Peanuts comic strip. In other words, at that time, anyway, their heads seem way too big for their bodies. It is amazing how nicely their heads shrink over time. But I digress.
What was so poignant about this Halloween Day, was that it marked the very first time Casey had gone trick or treating. She did not even seem to know what it was as she made her way being led by the teacher and parent helpers down the street.
They came to the first open door and out popped a kindly looking, older gentleman in a black suit. I realize now that while he seemed old to me at the time, we have grown to have a lot more in common on that front.
As I said, it was Casey’s first time trick or treating, possibly because she was our first child and her mother was inclined to not allow Casey to have candy as a general rule. I suppose I went along with it, even though I had paid my way through college by working as an ice cream man. Without her mother’s rules, though, I probably would be inclined to spoil Casey with sugar. Maybe she knew that and that is why she decided she needed to be so strict. Regardless, I always knew Casey had an unquenchable sweet tooth from the way she could snatch the box of brown sugar from the refrigerator without me even noticing it every time I opened it.
So despite the ban on candy in her life at the time, Casey stopped in front of the man, who motioned with a handful of candy for her to open her Halloween sack. With her jaw dropped, and her eyes popping out her head, she looked around, from the left to the right, then shook her head in the affirmative and opened her sack, giving the man a guilty glace as if to say, “Ok, I won’t tell if you won’t,” and grinned and accepted the candy.
I just had to laugh. And so I laugh inside a little bit every Halloween that I see the kids make their way down Main Street on Halloween. Even more that that though, I tend to look in the eyes of the young parents and I find myself hoping that in the decades to come, when their children are all grown, that they too will remember this day as if it were only yesterday.
Dennis Kaiser is the editor of the Sun Newspaper.
