![]() Yes, a monster was born, one who’d skip Sweet Valley High books and go straight for Stephen King and Anne Rice. My brother, our friends, and I would trick-or-treat around our Miami neighborhood at International Gardens (supervised, because…Hispanic moms), wishing it was twenty degrees cooler but loving the change in temperature just the same (back then, October nights were actually in the mid-70s, unlike now). It had to be a scary costume-anything else was un-Halloween. I started dressing up as a black cat, or a mummy (I insisted this be done “the right way” and made my mother sew yards and yards of long white fabric to wind around me), but never a princess or anything in pink. I started having Halloween-themed birthday parties, insisting we decorate with orange and black crepe paper, listen to Monster Mash, and play Bobbing for Apples with my friends who were delighted to stick their painted faces into a water-filled mop bucket rather than play Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Donkey for the umpteenth time (30 years later, I would do this correctly with a galvanized tin for my own kids’ birthday parties). I still go down the rabbit hole of creepy research, and tales of horror still fill me with delight. To this day, I still listen to that old record every October filled with melancholy and nostalgia. It was this record, now worn around the edges (but still in great shape) that fostered my love for ghost stories, such as “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving, my interest in Vlad, the Impaler (who I researched in 3rd grade until my teacher learned the book illustrations contained dismembered bodies and took it away), and all things horror. Because my birthday fell on October 12th, I started getting Halloween-themed presents from family, like a plastic Holly Hobby mask, abridged versions of Edgar Allan Poe stories for kids, or my favorite gift of that decade-an 1975 LP called “Famous Ghost Stories,” a collection of 10 recordings of classics such as “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Hitchhiker” narrated by voice actor, Wade Denning. ![]() Halloween didn’t remain meager for long, however. My brother and I already knew what to do and instinctively took to carving a creepy face into that gourd like we’d seen done every year in the CBS special, “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.” Every October, we’d ceremoniously break out that set of cardboard cutouts, too, with the same fervor as we would our fake Christmas tree in December. Fancy! She didn’t have to teach us how to carve. I’ll never forget the day my mother brought home an enormous pumpkin, along with a set of three cardboard decorations to tape-yes, tape-to the front windows. And in the spirit of fitting in, celebrated new holidays as well. No, these were the days of making sure you fit in ( Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, anyone?), so my parents made sure we ate American food, watched American TV, listened to American music, and made American friends. ![]() Nor were they the days of celebrating cultural differences. These weren’t the days of making sure “Latinx culture was well-represented” in all things media. My mother had attended an American school in Havana, had vacationed extensively in the US with her family, and already spoke English by the time she moved here in 1963, so with eyes on a new future, assimilating to American culture came easy for the family.īy the time my brother and I were born in 19, we were as American as any other family on the block. ![]() ![]() This was different from other Cuban American households, where parents often insisted their kids speak only Spanish as a way of preserving the language and culture, or maybe as a way of holding on to their paradise lost. Once my parents recognized they were never going home to Havana, however, that things were never “going back to normal” as long as Fidel Castro was in power, they figured they may as well settle into their new home and become full-blown Americans with full-blown American-born kids. As a child born to Cuban exiles in 1971, Halloween wasn’t a major holiday in our household for a while, since it wasn’t celebrated in Cuba. ![]()
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