'It was never about the costumes': The Story Line

"My life is not interesting at all," says a woman's voice on the other end of the phone.

"I'm too dull for a story."

"Oh, I bet that's not true," I reply.

I'm sitting in the studio at CBC in Charlottetown, talking to a stranger on the phone. I do this every month. Everybody's got a story, is the theory I'm working on. To prove it, I open the P.E.I. phone book to a random page and stab my finger at the first name I find.

This week, I find Lynn Dawson. She lives in Cape Traverse with her husband and son, but she grew up in nearby Tryon. She was born second of four sisters.

"Things were a lot different for us when we were kids," said Dawson.

"Like, for us, I grew up across the street from a pond. I'm not sure how we didn't give our mom, like, 99 heart attacks, because we were over there at that pond all summer and winter. Fishing in the summer and skating in the winter.

"And I did fall in," she chuckles. "More than once."

Halloween in the 70s

The night I call, the Dawson house is busy with Halloween preparations, which gets Lynn remembering Halloween when she was a kid.

Halloween in rural P.E.I. is a bit different than in the city or suburbs. You'd be walking an awful long time with little candy to show for it. Dawson and her sisters could walk to about three houses, before mum or dad had to bundle them into the car with their homemade costumes.

"I don't remember as a kid that you ever really got bought costumes," she said.

"It was always something you made. Except for, you might be able to buy the mask. Like, you'd get those plastic masks, you know? With the little elastic around the back? And they were right hard. You couldn't hardly see out of the eye holes."

It takes Dawson a few minutes to remember what she dressed up as. She recalls a creepy clown mask. And her parents once dressed her up in her father's broomball uniform. But for her, Halloween was never about the costumes. She was in it for the treats.

"I look at kids today and candy's not that big of a treat," she said.

"I remember it being maybe once a week you got to walk up to Sheldon Dixon's store, which was up at the end of the crossroads there in Tryon, and you'd get one treat."

Halloween, for a treat-lover like Dawson, was better than Christmas. And one treat in particular sticks out in her mind. This was the early 1970s, long before P.E.I.'s famous ban on aluminum cans came to an end.

"It was a big deal, because there was one house you could guarantee, if you went, you were gonna get canned pop," she says with a laugh.

"So everybody went to that house."

Sorting and trading

When Dawson and her sisters came home at the end of a long evening of trick-or-treating, the sorting ritual began.

First, Dawson would shrug off her costume and put on her pyjamas. Then she'd dump the whole bag on the ground.

"For me, I separated. It was all the candy in one pile, all the chips in one pile. And then the trading would begin."

Dawson didn't like Smarties, so she happily traded them to her sisters for her favoured licorice. And she would ration it out, so the treats would last for months.

When she grew up and had a child of her own, she discovered her experience with Halloween wasn't necessarily universal.

"My child doesn't like candy," she said.

"My child doesn't like the chocolate bars, the chips, and all that. He doesn't drink pop — still doesn't drink pop. It was the thrill of going trick-or-treating for him. He'd go out trick-or-treating and come back with all these treats and … my husband made out like a bandit."

Passing the torch

Her son, Evan, is now 19, so he's too old for trick-or-treats. But he still loves to dress up. He's getting his costume ready as we speak.

"Oh, that's great," I said. "What's he being?"

"I'm not sure," she laughs. "Some sort of monster or demon thing. I keep saying, 'You don't want to scare the littles too bad.'"

"Are you dressing up?"

"Oh no, no."

She's not handing out candy either. This year, their door in Cape Traverse will be answered by the next generation of Dawsons.

"I'll let him do it this year," she said.

"I did it last year."

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