10 Ways We Celebrated Halloween in the 90’s

The decade in which you grew up tends to be the most personally nostalgic. For me, I’m nostalgic for the 90’s. Throughout the month of October, I can’t help but still look for those classic elements that defined my childhood Halloweens.  Here are 10 great things that I remember about Halloween in the 90’s.

1. 90’s Halloween costumes

Every decade has their costume trends. For kids, this usually coincides with popular TV shows, movies, and celebrities. In the 90’s it was all about Nina Turtles, Batman (one of the three movie versions that were released in the 90’s or the animated series), the killer from Scream, and Power Rangers for boys. For girls, it was typically Disney Princesses (Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, and Pocahontas), the Spice Girls, and one year girls got creative recreating the look of Kate Winslet’s Rose from Titanic.

Those vintage plastic mask and vinyl costume sets began to disappear from costume racks after the 80’s, replaced with actual cloth costumes and rubber masks. Of course, that made them more expensive but also more appealing (that’s me in the photo above wearing a Pirate costume during my second grade Halloween parade at school). However, they weren’t the only option for trick-or-treating. At least half of my Halloween costumes were homemade, especially before I started school. I also knew kids whose moms bought sewing patterns and sewed Halloween costumes for them.

Some kids went for very unique looks. However, the more creative the costume idea, the harder it was to tell what you were trying to be. That led to constant guesses from adults handing out the candy and you having to explain yourself at each stop of your trick-or-treat route. The one exception I could think of was the year my sister wore her cow-patterned sweat suit with her witch costume on top. That year, everyone handing out candy to us this year raved about the “cow-witch.”

2. Halloween commercials

We 90’s kids were TV junkies which made us very impressionable to commercial advertising. And marketing teams delivered. We memorized commercial jingles, made our Christmas lists based on whatever toy commercials played in between cartoons, and we will go to our graves knowing the names of all of the cereal mascots. And they never failed to put out some awesome Halloween commercials. Notice how none of the products below are good for you in any way. But what they lacked in nutrition, they made up for in entertainment.

Some of my favorites include (links open in new tab):

• 1991 Pepsi and Doritos Monster Mash for Monster Money – Frankenstein’s monster freaks out when he discovers that he has both sides of a winning ticket as part of the Monster Mash for Monster Money contest and bursts through his front door, leaving his nagging wife behind.
• 1993 Pepsi and Doritos Commercial – Frankenstein’s Monster carries a Pepsi truck to a haunted house where his monster friends are throwing a Halloween party. I also loved the fact that the monsters themselves showed up on the Doritos bags and Pepsi cans/bottles each fall.
• Cap’N Crunch Peanut Butter Crunch zombies – A trio of zombies bursts in on some kids to get at their Peanut Butter Crunch only to find that they’ve eaten it all. But the Cap’N zooms in to save the day with a truck full of cartoon boxes of cereal.
• Pizza Hut – Pizza Head, talking a slice of pizza with a face made of toppings, stumbles into a haunted house while on his way to get some stuffed crust pizza and ends up catching a ride from Count Steve, a pizza cutter dressed as a vampire that turns into a bat and carries him away.
• Monster Cereal – Count Chocula feeds some cartoon kids some Monster Cereal from his new glow-in-the-dark box.
• McDonalds Happy Meal Buckets – The McNuggets create a Frankenstein-like creature before promoting McDonald’s classic buckets shaped like a pumpkin, ghost, and witch with cookie cutter lids.
• Dunkin Donuts Commercial – The “Time to Make the Donuts” guy decorates some Halloween-themed donuts for the trick-or-treaters.
• Fruity Pebbles – Fred thinks Barney has dressed up as a ghost to steal his Fruity Pebbles, but it turns out the ghost is real.

3. Halloween TV specials

Kids have been watching It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown for decades now. But in the 90’s, cartoons, sitcoms, and other popular shows made their Halloween episode a highlight of their season. Some of them got genuinely scary (for network TV at least) like the Stevil episodes of Family Matters, the slasher episode of Boy Meets World, and the stalker episode from Home Improvement. Others were fun and funny, like The Drew Carey Show, Dharma and Greg, and the queen of Halloween: Roseanne.

The cartoons even got in on the season, airing Halloween-themed episodes of their most popular shows, sometimes even during prime time hours. These included: Tiny Toon Adventures, Hey Arnold!, and The Rugrats Halloween Special. And if you really wanted to be kept awake at night, you watched Are You Afraid of the Dark and Goosebumps, which always went all-out for their Halloween episodes.

If you want to reminisce more about Halloween TV sitcoms and watch clips and the full episodes themselves, check out my article on HubPages: 10 Great Halloween TV Episodes and Specials

4. Dressed up lawn geese

Do you remember those goose-shaped lawn ornaments? People, usually old ladies, used to dress up their lawn geese throughout the year. Everyone seemed to have a Halloween costume or outfit for their geese. Even if they had no other decoration in their yard or on their house, the geese were decked out in jack-o-lantern shirts or witch hats and capes.

They were one of the first indications that Halloween was around the corner. And when you’re just a kid, they’re closer to eye level. So, it made them easy to spot. Those geese are still around today, but I don’t see this suburban staple like I used to.

5. McDonald’s Halloween promotions

Our 90’s childhoods really were run by brands. Thanks to clever marketing, McDonald’s was always offering cool, Halloween-themed Happy Meal toys that you just had to have. Sometimes these were McDonald Land characters dressed up in costumes. Other times, they coincided with the release of a Halloween-themed movie. But the big prize was scarfing one of the Halloween buckets that they released each year.

One year, my brother, sister, and I each got one. I got the witch, my brother got the ghost, and my sister got the pumpkin. They glowed in the dark and had Halloween shapes cut into their lids that could be used as cookie cutters.

When my youngest sister came along, she collected some of the later editions that featured the McDonald Land characters bordering the outside. These pails were too small for any respectable kid to trick-or-treat with. So, instead, we hung them up as decorations. To this day, they hang from my parents’ front porch railing every October.

Occasionally while trick-or-treating, a neighbor would slip you a gift certificate for small fries at McDonalds or a small Frosty at Wendy’s. If it didn’t tear or crumple in your pillow case, pulling it out of your haul at the end of the night felt like holding cold, hard cash.

Afterward, every time you passed by a fast food restaurant, you reminded your mom that you had the certificates. Or, you would make a special trip one night to use them up. It was a welcome alternative to the bag of candy, chips, and Little Hugs that you gorged on until Thanksgiving, even if it was just as unhealthy.

6. Reflective tape on your costume

I remember having a Halloween safety assembly in the second grade. The local police officers came and taught us to check our candy, not to go into strange houses, and to watch for cars. Afterward, we were all issued a strip of reflective tape to put on our costumes. This tape would catch the headlight beams of any passing cars to keep us from being hit. I remember being adamant about wearing my reflective tape on my back that year. And after seeing that almost no one else was wearing reflective tape while trick-or-treating, that was the end of that tradition.

7. Picture decorations

These days, people go out all with their outdoor decorations. They cover their shrubs in spider webs, place tombstones in their yards, and cover their porches with hay bales and pumpkins.

When I was growing up, the majority of our decorations were pictures made of heavy paper that you taped to your windows. We had witches, jack-o-lanterns, and black cats that we taped to each of our front windows. Then, on Halloween night, we would light a single jack-o-lantern.

Over the years, these paper decorations would tear, and their top layers would be stripped off from trying to peel off the tape before they were put away for the year. They were heavy. So they were constantly falling down, and you couldn’t see them at night. My mom hated that they blocked out the sun during the day. So, as they aged, they were replaced with window clings which had their own pros and cons. But to me, these images will always be the quintessential 90’s Halloween decoration.

8. Funnybones and other Halloween books

As a kid who loved to read, there was nothing better than when your teacher stopped everything to read a picture or chapter book to the class. At Halloween, that meant busting out a copy of Funnybones. Funnybones is a book written by Allan and Janet Ahlberg. It’s the first in a series of books about a family of skeletons and their late night adventures. It was spooky and funny at the same time, my favorite kind of horror.

The backgrounds were a solid black on each page so that the white bones of the skeleton characters would pop, giving the illustrations movement and energy. It’s one of those books that takes me back to my 90’s childhood whenever I see it.

Other popular picture books to read at Halloween in the 90’s included:

• Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
• In A Dark, Dark Room
• The Green (Yellow) Ribbon
• Arthur’s Halloween
• Spot’s Halloween
• A Tiger Called Thomas
• Clifford’s Halloween
• Goosebumps
• The Little Old Lady Who Wasn’t Afraid of Anything
• Happy Haunting, Amelia Bedelia

I’m also going to throw in Goodnight Moon, which I still find to be one of the creepiest books I’ve ever read for the pictures alone. Something about the color scheme of those illustrations makes me feel like a murder is about to take place in that quiet room.

9. Skin and Bones and other Halloween songs

Music class in the 90’s consisted of singing along to old records and cassette tapes and learning the hand motions to go with each song. At my school, we put on music concerts every winter and spring. So, autumn classes were about just singing Halloween songs for fun.

One song that we sang year round, though, was “Skin and Bones.” “Skin and Bones” was about a raggedy woman’s walk through a graveyard and the jump scare that comes at the end. Our hands shot up as our music teacher assigned a handful of students to act out the parts. The most coveted part was the person who got to hide in the closet and pop out to scare the old woman at the end. Each verse ended with a ghostly moan that used to creep us out, especially we sang with the lights off.

If this song sounds familiar but you can’t quite place it, you can check out a YouTube video of the song here.

10. Daylight savings time

If you lived in an area of the U.S. that observed daylight savings time, we used to fall back the weekend before Halloween in the 90’s. That meant that by the time 6 pm hit, the standard time for trick-or-treating in our area, it was already dark. Sometimes I wished that it would start a little earlier so that I could experience trick-or-treating while the sun was still up, like the kids in E.T.

Then, several ago, they moved daylight savings to the weekend after Halloween. So, the sun doesn’t completely set till around 7pm. It’s nice in some ways because it’s easier for kids to see and for you to see their costumes. But you can’t turn your lights on or get the classic Halloween night atmosphere until the second half of trick-or-treating.

What are your favorite memories from Halloween in the 90’s? What did you like best about Halloween when you were growing up? Leave your memories and comments below!

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