I have always loved Halloween. OK, I have always loved candy. Who can resist chocolate kisses and miniature candy bars in bright, autumn-colored wrappers? (Actually, any wrappers, but I digress.) Halloween is also significant because, at least for me, it is the official start of the holiday season.

I began to wonder, as friends started talking about costumes for their kids, how much Halloween has changed over the years. I decided to go the experts. My first stop was the Meals for Me dining room site at the Kiwanis Civic Center in Hampden.

“The biggest difference is no home-cooked goodies anymore,” said Carol Thomas, 72, dining room manager for the Hampden site. “People are afraid to eat unwrapped goodies today.

“We used to give homemade fudge, popcorn balls, cookies and apples,” she recalled. “There just didn’t used to be so much candy in stores. And, we used to make our children’s costumes, but they’re usually bought now. My mother never would have bought one.”

Thomas remembers dressing up one year in her sister’s nursing uniform.

“The dress was very long on me and had the nurse’s apron that they wore at that time. It was my favorite costume,” she said.

It was a simpler time, Thomas said with a sigh as a handful of other ladies nodded in agreement.

“We didn’t have any money so we just put a face on a paper bag and pulled it over our heads,” said Roberta Marsh, 84.

Old tattered clothes and shoes with holes worked well, too, said Sharon Estey, 57, volunteer at the dining room. “Dressing up as a hobo was very popular. I did it more than one year – it was such an easy costume to put together.”

“When my kids were little they wanted to be a princess and a cowboy,” said Thomas. “Today the costumes are more exotic. I think that started with the movie ‘Star Wars.'”

Well, so much for the costumes and treats. Now, how about the tricks?

“One year I gave out apples because that was all I had,” said Dottie Anderson, 80, with a grin. “The kids wrote on my windows ‘No apples’ in wax. And one year, a boy put my wheelbarrow on top of the roof. He said he did it alone, but I never figured out how.”

I was starting to get the picture of Halloween past. Next stop, Freeses Assisted Living facility in Bangor.

Otha Corey, 84, was no stranger to tricks. He remembered, with a twinkle in his eye, a doctor who had a carved wooden crow in his front yard.

“You know, it was strange,” he recalled. “Every year that crow turned white. How do you suppose that happened?”

Elaine Sargent, 69, recalls writing on store windows with wax, and watching the next day as the owners would wash them while muttering, “Those darn kids.” The memory still makes her laugh. “One year one of the shop owners got wise and greased up the window so we couldn’t write on it,” she said, smiling.

Even with pranks, it was a safer time for children, said Esther Hodsdon, 72.

“You have to be so careful now. That’s the biggest difference,” she said when comparing Halloweens of the past to today.

Vicki Clay, whose four children are not allowed to trick or treat at the homes of strangers, echoes the sentiment.

“We only go to friends’ houses in the neighborhood, and I drive them to friends’ houses who don’t live near us,” she said. “I won’t check the candy because I know everyone personally, but certainly would if I didn’t know where the candy came from.”

Another sign of the times; her sons will be dressed as Spongebob Squarepants, a cartoon character on Nickelodeon, and Harry Potter, boy wizard.

And for some children it is better to give than to receive.

“His favorite part of Halloween is handing out candy to the other trick-or-treaters,” said Jan Smith of her 4-year-old son, Jack, who will be clad as a Clone Trooper from “Star Wars.”

Candy and costumes. It seems the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Happy Halloween.

Carol Higgins is director of communications at Eastern Agency on Aging. For information on EAA services and programs, call the resource and referral department at 941-2865 or log on www.eaaa.org.