Well, since today is the big “H” day, I figured it might as well be appropriate to look back at my childhood and remember how I dealt with this special time. I always liked Halloween, and it was for the same reason ninety-nine percent of kids across America did – for the free candy. Well, it isn’t exactly free; you have to sport a costume and walk from house to house demanding sweets. I tried to remember some of my old costumes, and here is what I came up with, in no particular order:

Early-to-mid-1980s: My mom sewed a badass Star Wars X-Wing Pilot outfit. I think I remember her getting some how-to kit and making it herself, but in the end I didn’t care because I got to pimp around in an orange-and-white outfit with a blaster at my side. Throughout the original Star Wars trilogy, I was always more partial to Han Solo than to Luke Skywalker (what heterosexual kid isn’t?), but on this night it didn’t matter because for a few hours I was a friggin’ X-Wing Pilot.

Early-to-mid-1980s: I can’t remember whose idea this was, but one my old man took a huge box, shaped it up and covered it in yellow duct tape. Who was I? Pac Man. Again, this was one of those costumes I remember from my childhood simply because it was unique. There was one problem: the eye slit that was cut for me so I would see when I walked really limited my point of view (and forget about any peripheral vision). In addition, the box had a narrow opening at its bottom, and because of this it didn’t let me walk at my normal stride; I also remembered being sore as hell the next morning. If Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde (or whatever the names of those ghosts were) came looking for me, I would have been s.o.l. But who cares? For a few hours I was friggin’ Pac-Man.

There are two more costumes I remember sporting, and both dealt with movie characters from movies I loved back as a kid and still enjoy today. One was Eliot Ness. This get-up was easy. I wore a suit and those gangsta hats, along with a pellet shotgun and pistol – and neither one had that gay-ass orange barrel that toy guns today have on them. Another year I was dressed up as one of those marines from the “Aliens” movie. For those that have seen this film, I fancied myself as being the Hudson character, which, in the moments before his death, went batshit and began cussing at all the creepy crawlers before he was eventually done in. Now that’s a role model for the youth.

Sadly, what I associate most with Halloween now are the Christmas displays a number of stores now put out this time of the year. As a kid, the fall/winter holiday season broke up into three different sections for me: Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. It’s a bit depressing to see these three events snowball into one because when I was a kid, each one had significance for me. Halloween was for candy. Thanksgiving was for turkey. Christmas was for presents. Now these lines have been blurred to the point where anything after Labor Day is like one huge holiday where people dressed up in witches’ outfits with drumstick in their mouths are opening gift-wrapped boxes. Then again, maybe it has always been this way and I just don’t remember. Either way, I really don’t care.

Because for a few minutes I got to remember that for a few hours I was once a friggin’ X-Wing Pilot.