By Rob Holbert Managing Editor

OK, I know it sounds like I’m getting old, but things really have changed.

Yes, Halloween has changed. After walking Ulysses and Ursula around our block again the other night collecting candy, one of the main things going through my head – other than “Why aren’t there more Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups,” and “What the hell is a Skull Pop?” – is just how different things are these days.

For the second year in a row, my lovely, intelligent wife went out and bought fancy costumes for our children. Some kind of thematic thing from the “Narnia” movie they like to watch. And I’ll admit, they looked cute in them. But just like last year, the kids bailed on wearing their new costumes when it came to “showtime.”

On the Friday prior to Halloween we took them to “Fright Night” at Ft. Conde, and the kids actually wore their new costumes. As soon as we got in the car to go home, they both informed us they wouldn’t be wearing them on the big night. In fact, Ulysses decided to go back to the costume he refused to wear last year – a really cool Spiderman outfit with built-in foam muscles.

He’s a year older now, though, and the Spidey outfit is a bit tight. Some might even say it’s borderline obscene. I checked the Web and saw no registered pedophiles in the neighborhood, though, so he got the green light on the Tighty-Spidey outfit. Ursula pretty much followed suit and decided to wear the costume she shunned last year – a ballerina getup.

Truthfully, it all works out fine, as long as you don’t focus on the bucks you spend on some fancy Halloween costume that may never make a real premiere. Ulysses and Ursula looked good in their slightly outgrown outfits. Granted, Ulysses wouldn’t wear his Spidey mask, a cloth thing that looked pretty good compared to the old-school plastic masks of my youth, and that bothered me a little.

As a kid his age I would have KILLED for a Spiderman outfit like that. This thing is the bomb. It’s got all the right colors and it has built-in muscles. Actually, it’s so heavily muscled that many people thought he was Superman at first, because there was no mask. Some mentioned that Spiderman wasn’t necessarily supposed to be so bulked up and there might need to be some tests for human growth hormone. Regardless, I would have loved to have a costume like that when I was Ulysses’ age.

In fact, as a 5-year-old, I did ask my mother to get me a Spiderman costume. Of course, this was back in the days of the lame plastic masks with the elastic bands on the back and the plastic outfits – if you were lucky enough to get a store-bought outfit. My mom, never one to waste cash on something when it could be made or bought for less at TG&Y (really old, crappier version of K-Mart), wasn’t about to pony up the three or four bucks needed for an all-in-one costume, though. Instead, she found some bargain-bin reject plastic mask that was GREEN, but had some vague kind of web-like design. Never mind that Spiderman’s colors are clearly red and blue, this was on sale!

Next, she got some BROWN material, cut out a vaguely kid-shaped form and sewed it together. She then took a black crayon and drew webs all over this, and voila!, I was Spiderman – if you’d never seen Spiderman. It was the sorriest approximation of a Spiderman anyone could have put together. Totally wrong mask. Wrong colors. Wrong everything.

Growing up, I settled on being Dracula 10 years in a row simply because it was the only costume we could pull off without tragically screwing it up. Fake teeth, cape, baby oil in hair – boom!, you got Dracula. Don’t even get me started on the mummy outfit made of Ace bandages and about 500 safety pins. Trust me, mummy is a costume that should be at the bottom of your list.

So even though I complain about it, I totally understand where my wife is coming from in getting fancy, store-bought costumes for our kids. She lived the same nightmare. Gentry has often told me of the time she was supposed to be an owl in a play and her mother whipped together a last-minute costume composed of reading glasses and yellow gardening gloves. And that was on stage. Ouch!

The other thing that’s drastically different about Halloween now versus back in “the day” is the quality of the candy. Jesus, everything is great now! Everyone buys good stuff. We do it too.

When I was a kid, you had to sift through piles of those crappy, tasteless toffees wrapped in blandly colored wax paper just to find the occasional Hershey’s mini or maybe a Milky Way. Now it’s all good.

My kids are rifling through their bags, shunning candies I would have killed for in my own youth. My goodness, if I got a Crunch bar when I was a kid, it would have been a red-letter-Halloween. My kids had at least 10 Crunch bars, and they were all almost regular sized.

That’s the other thing, a lot of people now don’t even give out mini candy. There are regular-sized Reese’s cups and the like. My mind would have been swimming as a kid sitting there in a green Spiderman mask if I’d jammed my hand into the bag and gotten a real, man-sized Reese’s cup. Back then such an anomaly would definitely have been deemed the work of a maniac who had injected it with rat poison. Or maybe that was just my parents’ way of getting the good candy for themselves. “Gee son, this thing has a needle hole in it. I’ll take it and throw it away.”

So now that I think about it, maybe the changes are for the best. Yes, my son might be tested for steroids and both kids will grow up spoiled, thinking their costumes and candy should be perfect. But at least none will ever wear a green Spiderman mask.

Rob Holbert is Lagniappe managing editor. Contact him at rholbert@lagniappemobile.com.

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