Absolutely fantastic bit of nostalgia here, if you are from Northern Ireland and Of A Certain Age. It's often the more subtle things that have the capacity to move us by their old familiarity as we get older - the way people used to call masks "false faces", the false faces themselves (the cheaper and more neon, the more appealing, to my mind), the cans of silly string, and even, strangely, the discussion of having to get a fireworks licence. Fireworks are traditional here at Halloween, but when I was growing up they were hard to get.
The context of that is that we were living through an armed conflict at the time, so it was considered unwise to freely sell explosives to the unlicensed public. What this meant in practice was that it was an open secret that the police used confiscated fireworks at home with their families, and that wealthier people who owned boats got around the ban by using ship's flares.
Handheld sparklers and other indoor fireworks could be sold freely, and were therefore hugely popular. Ironically, now they sell the things on Amazon UK, but you can't buy them from Northern Ireland because they can't be sent through the post. But these were ubiquitous in the 80s and 90s:
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Vintage ad for the 1975 Captain Kirk mask by Don Post Studios, later used as the mask of Michael Myers in Halloween (1978).
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Halloween home window display (1972)
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Children with masks on Halloween, 1942.
Photo: Helen Levitt via the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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(via 29th October 2023 - all things amazing —)
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