Halloween is back next week, and it’s the season for costumes and candy. There is still a part of me that gets a kick out of seeing what the new costumes are each year, as Halloween was such a fun part of my childhood. I do think that it may have decreased in participation a bit from those days because of society.

Like most mothers, mine kept pictures of my costumes from those days, and it was always a hoot to go back and look at myself in all my glory.

The first four years that I dressed up, I was decked out in those cheap plastic bib-like smocks and flimsy plastic masks made by Collegeville. In my early years, I was Spider-Man, a mummy, Frankenstein’s monster and then Cop-Tur from the Transformers rip-off Go-Bots.

Each of those costumes can still be seen, believe it or not, on Google Images.

When I finally got old enough for more advanced get-ups, I moved into the latex mask phase. My first over-head mask, purchased at the old TG&Y store in downtown Mt. Sterling, was a zombie with green hair and a green snake going in the cheek and out the mouth.

I still have that mask somewhere, and still think it’s pretty neat for its time.

The next year, I picked out a great wolf mask that I wound up wearing two years in a row. Werewolves were my favorite monsters, and as I got older and developed a thick and coarse beard that needs shaving on a daily basis, I look back and curse at myself.

My string of being monsters for Halloween was broken in 1990, the year of the first Batman movie. I was The Joker way back before everyone and their hamster donned the Heath Ledger makeup scheme. The next two years — my final for dressing up for Halloween — I was WWF wrestlers.

Funny story time.

In 1992, I went to school dressed as the wrestler The Ultimate Warrior with my face painted with the character’s trademark design.

My stepfather’s boss at the time, the publisher of the newspaper that I co-owned many years later, had a plastic chest and stomach piece that was sculpted to look like a bodybuilder with all the muscles carved out. The most realistic aspect of the piece were the nipples, which were realistically colored and protruding.

In hindsight, it may have been a bit overboard for a sixth-grader to show up in at school, but I thought it was cool as could be — at least between my neck and my waist with my arms cut off. No steroids necessary.

So there is a full retrospective of my Halloween history. Though I don’t pop on a mask or costume anymore, I still get a kick out of Halloween each year and the really creative costumes. I get the biggest kick of all out of the candy.

Nick Hon is the editor of The Jessamine Journal and Jessamine Life magazine and Jessamine Journal. He can be reached at nick.hon@jessaminejournal.com.