The teacher might bring in a pumpkin to carve, but anyone who planted pumpkins used them for pies, not jack-o'-lanterns. Instead we cut jack-o'-lanterns and witches on brooms and ghosts and black cats from construction paper. We pasted these above the blackboards that ran across the front of the school.
Some of us would bring in candy: colorful and super-sugary corn, black- and orange-wrapped taffy kisses with peanut butter centers, and caramels. We might counter the sweetness by eating the apples we bobbed for in a round tin tub.
The 4-H Club livened things up at night with a bonfire. 4-Hers would gather dry branches and sticks and build the fire somewhere it couldn't spread, typically in someone's fieldsor on the gravel drive at the school. Almost all of us carried pocket knives, and we'd find slender branches about four feet long, strip them, and whittle points at the tips. As the flames died down, you put a wiener on the end of your stick and held it over the coals. Usually we ate the hotdogs burned on the outside and cold in the middle, which described us as we huddled around the fire in the cold.
The best part was the dessert, marshmallows roasted on the end of the sticks. I never minded if mine got burnt, as long as the inside melted to a gooey mess. Nothing matches the feel of a melted marshmallow on the tongue and the chilly night air on the skin.
—Carolyn Mulford
