My brother was born on Halloween, which meant we grew up celebrating his birthday with a party with the neighborhood kids before setting out to trick-or-treat.

I can taste the potato sticks now.

We loved Halloween.  Living in a suburban “Leave it to Beaver” neighborhood in the 1950’s meant we had an abundance of houses to hit up for candy.  We ended up with huge bowls of the stuff.

Banjo Man grew up on a Nebraska farm and only remembers trick-or-treating once in his life, and that involved walking in a muddy ditch to the neighboring farm.  He wasn’t impressed.

Son #1, living in suburban neighborhood north of Austin, celebrates Halloween Texas-style.  The kids get candy, but the adults visit homemade margarita stations or can take their pick of cold beer from icy tubs set up near the candy buckets.

Living out in the woods as we do now, there will be no one knocking on the door and excitedly shouting, “Trick or treat!”

That’s sad.  But I’m going to buy a can of potato sticks (Halloween Past), some bags of M&M’s just in case (Halloween Future), fix myself a margarita (Halloween Present) and watch a couple of episodes of Treme on Amazon.

If you’d like to know more about my brother’s latest hit, click here: