My Nickel’s Worth

As Halloween approaches, I have been thinking back to my own childhood.  We didn’t really celebrate the idea behind Halloween, but we always had a fall festival at our church, and I always dressed up like a New York Yankees baseball player. Oh, I went trick-or -treating a few times in our neighborhood, but the fall festival was amazing!

We called it “The Pumpkin Patch Carnival,” and we had games, inflatables, and a dunk tank.  I loved playing the games and collecting as much chocolate as possible.  As I became older, we had a photo booth, and I was always enlisted to dress up like Batman or Spiderman and take pictures with the kids—as if they were taking character pictures at Disney World.  Somewhere in a few hundred kids’ scrapbooks are their pictures with me!

I have fond memories of school parties—with different crafts, cookies shaped like pumpkins, and bags of candy we took home.  I have always enjoyed sweets, and this time of year seemed to be the only time I really could get away with eating as much chocolate as I wanted.  

I also remember school field trips to pumpkin patches with picnics and hay mazes, and I love the adventure of it all.

But perhaps the best memory I have of this time of year was in college.  My roommate and I attended a college mixer/hayride, and the director gave us more than 100 leftover hot dogs.  We took them back to our dorms and tried to give them away, but the students were leerie of us—so we started selling them.  We sold those hot dogs for two dollars a piece on a college campus, and because they weren’t free, people bought them.  We laughed for years about this crazy yet hilarious idea of ours, and to this day, I can’t think about a hayride or Halloween without thinking about the time we sold hot dogs on a college campus.