I grew up in Okinawa, Japan. Not on base, not just for a couple of years. I was there from before the start of First Grade until halfway through my Junior year of high school. I lived out "on the economy" and attended off-base schools. I loved it.
My favorite holiday was ALWAYS Halloween, and not because of the candy. I usually ended up eating my Reeses Peanut Butter cups and Almond Joys, trading the rest away for gum, and then squirreling the gum away for years until it turned into amorphous, pinkish, fossils.
I loved Halloween for the morbidness, the dark festivity, the costumes, the nocturnalness, and the Scandal.
By Scandal I mean that I went to private school and there was always much hullabaloo over whether "practicing" Halloween was Satanic or not. Well, Jurassic Park and pokemon cards were possible Satan tools as well, and so far my head still doesn't spin all the way around.
My sisters and I did not trick-or-treat off-base. We may have attempted it once, but it was such a disappointment compared to the efficiency of on-base trick-or-treating. Plus we got to see all of the Americans in their natural habitats. Many of them were very creative, turning their drab base housing and yards into near theme park quality spooky zones. I mean, smoke machines, sound effects, strobe lights, and full-on architecture to make witch huts and devil dens and the like. It was great. It was also fun to go up to houses with their lights on to find notes on the door about the people inside praying for our damned souls. I don't think they meant for the notes to be spooky, but to little private school girls, that was one of the scariest tricks going.
Just because we didn't trick-or-treat off base, doesn't mean that we didn't get more than our fair share of trick-or-treaters. On the contrary, being one of only a handful of "Yankee Plate" houses in the neighborhood meant that we got tons.
They never wore costumes, not in the 90's. It was always play clothes or their school uniforms. They came in packs of 4 to 12, for the most part unsupervised by any sort of adult.
At the first house we lived in, we had a gated driveway. Nothing fancy mind you- think large enough to fit a small minivan and naught else, with a swinging gate made of silver painted re-bar, theoretically to keep the van from gaining autonomy and getting away. Theft is still nearly unheard of there, much like not locking up your belongings is nearly unheard of here.
The children, ranging in age from "barely walking" to "old enough to vote" did not presume to open the unlocked gate to approach our door. This was a conundrum because our van said "Y for Yankees Live Here" on the plates so we must have hordes of junk food just inside waiting to be distributed.
The solution was to gently (kind of) jiggle the gate and make a ruckus by hollering "Hoppee Har-ween!" and "Cheek-o-cheee" until a surprised and confused little blonde child came out to see what was going on.
Upon inspection of their pantomimes, I detected that the children wanted candy, and went in to tell my parents.
I spoke loftily that they were uncostumed, they had the wrong date, and furthermore, it was 10 AM. My parents did not find validity in my complaint and sent me back to them with fruit roll-ups or something ridiculous from the pantry.
Big mistake. I could have been distributing legal tender or unicorns and recieved the same response.
They returned for weeks. We gave them Ritz crackers, beef jerky, and whatever else we had.
These kids were not starving. They probably had more food at home than we did. But our food was American, and they were enthralled.
I toyed with the idea of distributing dog treats because the children had gotten all of my shark bites the day before. I was probably scolded.
This game continued almost until Thanksgiving. And for every year after.
We moved 8 years later, to a house several miles away. They found us. Or similar children practicing a tradition no doubt propagated by my family were already in place.
Our new house had windows all around and sliding glass doors across the back. The children in this neighborhood had no gate to deter them and they fell upon us like a team of highly trained tactical fighters. Every door or window had a child or two at it, and they rapped gently on the glass with giddy chants of "Cheek-o-cheee" and "Hoppee Har-ween".
By this time we knew the drill and started out with less than stellar snack options. But they came anyway. In waves. From morning until after midnight. They would return until each one had heard in my unfortunate Japanese that Halloween ended in October.
They didn't have bags for their treats, I suppose that would be presumptive and appear greedy. They would cup their hands together into little bowls and accept whatever treat happened to be accessible; several doritos from a bag I had opened for myself, a variety of gourmet tic-tacs, party favors from some dumb birthday party favor bag. They accepted the offerings with so much gratitude and excitement it made up for the fact that it was only socially acceptable for me to celebrate my favorite holiday one day a year.
It was a strange and rather wonderful transcription of our American tradition. "Share your foreign junk food with the neighborhood kids month".
I miss it.
*Disclaimer. I typed this with some words purposefully spelled wrong to illustrate the accents of the children in the story. I feel like this is necessary to accurately describe the events that occurred and I do not do so with the intent to mock. These kids are probably all tri-lingual now because they attended Japanese public school where a second language fluency is compulsory and a lot of kids take a third language "for fun".
No comments:
Post a Comment