Halloween 1986

Where I grew up, trick or treat was always on the Friday before Halloween, same with my dad’s parents, so we always got to hit up 2 nights on that Fridays. My other Grandparents, my moms, had trick or treat on the 31st, Halloween Proper.  So usually, we would go over there for a second night of Trick or Treating.  In 1986, they all fell on the same night.

That year, for whatever reason my mom decided to go with a Hershey Kiss as my costume.  It was a Collegeville costume, and had a scratch and sniff patch on it, and the whole costume has this whiff of fake chocolate.  My brother had a Ben Cooper GI Joe costume on.  Below are the 1987 catalog pages from Collegeville and Ben Cooper that shows the costumes availability.  These pages where uploaded by plaidstallions.com go check them out for so much retro content.

My mom said she got them from K-Mart that year, I was 5 and my brother was 7.  I found the K-Mart halloween circular from our local newspaper for that year and it looks like she got em for pretty cheap, only $3.57.

A couple years ago during covid, I got into a really “buying my childhood on eBay” phase, as I think a lot of us did, amongst other weird hobbies.  I bought this costume October 21, 2020 so it has taken me 6 years to finally unpack it and write about it.

I remember trick or treating as one of my favorite things even and all the stuff about Halloween that went with it!  Being 5, it was fun, but in between 5 and maybe 12 years old is when you REALLY start to develop that love of Halloween!   Here are some pics of me showing off the costume I wore on October 31st, 1986 on October 27th 2026, forty freaking years later!

What were some of your most memorable costumes? Let me know in the comments!

-RK

BONUS: When looking up stuff in my local paper, on Sunday 10/26/86, the did this write up about the yet to be named Nasty Boys who went to the same high school that Squeezer and Saquon Barkley went to