The Hobo

I know that Halloween is long gone, and some of us have already moved on to enjoy the Christmas season...

But I want to share a photo of My Youngest which keeps catching my eye when I'm scrolling through the cache. He was a hobo for Halloween, which was something we often dressed up as when we were kids ourselves. We lived rurally, just as my family does now, and Halloween costumes were not something we thought about preparing until the day of --- or the night before, if we got really excited. Big neighborhood trick-or-treating didn't happen for us, so it wasn't something we obsessed about. We only envied our friends their pillowcase-FUL candy wealth and their tales of door-to-door glory from the big night as they were being shared on the bus the next morning.

Anyway, we did get to go to a few houses out here in the boonies, and on arriving home from school after our Halloween school party, we'd ask desperately, "What can I be???" Standard reply: hobo or gypsy. No plastic masks or nylon costumes required! Supplies at the ready in the house! Just a little effort and off we'd go.

That's not exactly how it went for my boy, the only one still willing to dress up and go trick-or-treating.

I'd bought this mask, actually labeled 'Fool', at Walmart as soon as the Halloween stuff went on the shelves. I buy some masks and disguise items every year, just for fun and games around the house. Last year, it was an Old Man latex mask along with an Elvis pull-over mask. So he had alot to choose from, but went with this newest mask, renamed 'Hobo'. In the company of his cousins (Storm Troopers - with plastic masks and nylon costumes), he got to canvas a whole neighborhood, door-to-door with the other fools, and he got .............. a pillowcase-FUL of candy (hanging from the end of his hobo stick) and a lot of laughs about his costume.