When I was of the age to be trick-or-treating, I always wondered about the kids who used the plastic pumpkin to carry their haul. My wife agrees, as she was one of those hoity-toity rich kids who had one, and reports that you had to head home and empty your bucket multiple times during a good Halloween run. Since 2020 has made the traditional Halloweenery unlikely to impossible, the argument of pillowcase or plastic pumpkin is still a good one, if only in retrospect, leading to today’s style versus carrying space query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) usually went with the canvas bag from my paper route, because I grew up in an 80s sitcom, asking: Pillowcase or Plastic Pumpkin?
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Depends on what you see as the spirit of Halloween. The style of the Jack-o-lantern pumpkin is definitely more in keeping with the trappings of the day, but the volume of a pillowcase is definitely more in line with the “gimme gimme candy!” greed of Hallowe’en. (There’s got to be a seasonal market for jack-o-lantern, witch, black cat, ghost, etc. print pillowcases. I’m kind of surprised we haven’t seen those on mass sale.)
So, when I was little and my parents knew enough to reign in my access to mass amounts of sugar, it was the plastic pumpkin. Only when I was older, on the edge of too old to still be trick-or-treating, did I have the independence to transition to the strategic greed of a pillowcase.