The Vintage Hallowe'en We Lost: Masquerade Balls, Midnight Games, and a Night Built for Grownups
Picture Halloween and most of us picture children first — costumes sized for candy bags, porch lights left on, plastic pumpkins swinging door to door. That version of the holiday feels timeless, like it's always been this way.
It hasn't. For a good stretch of the early twentieth century, Halloween belonged to grown women first, and children were almost an afterthought.
The Masquerade Era
Through the 1920s and into the 1930s, Halloween was primarily an adult social occasion. Masquerade balls. Costume parties. Dance halls strung ceiling to ceiling in crepe paper, orchestras hired for the night, real prizes awarded for the most striking disguise. Women dressed for these nights the way they'd dress for any other golden-age evening out — with intention, with drama, with a full transformation from the woman who left the house that morning.
It wasn't a children's holiday that adults tolerated for one evening. It was, for a few decades, the reverse entirely — a night built by and for grown women who wanted one evening a year to become someone else completely.
The shift toward a children's holiday came later, after the war. Candy companies found a lucrative angle in trick-or-treating. Suburbs made door-to-door visiting easy and safe in a way city apartment buildings never quite were. And a wave of Halloween vandalism in the 1930s and 40s — actual property damage, not harmless mischief — pushed communities toward organized, supervised, kid-centered events instead. Somewhere in that transition, the grown-up version of the holiday quietly disappeared.
The Games People Actually Played
Before Halloween was about candy, it was widely understood as a night when the veil between the present and the future got a little thin — and the games people played at these parties reflected exactly that.
Apple paring was a favorite: peel an apple in one long, unbroken strip and toss the peel over your shoulder. Whatever letter it seemed to form when it landed was supposedly the first initial of your future spouse. Mirror gazing was stranger — walk backward down a staircase at midnight holding a candle and a mirror, and the face said to appear over your shoulder in the glass belonged to whoever you'd one day marry. Nut burning was quieter: place two nuts side by side on the hearth, one for each half of a couple, and watch. Burn steadily together, and the match was a happy one. Crack or jump apart, and it wasn't meant to be.
None of it was meant to be taken entirely seriously. It was parlor entertainment — an excuse to gather by candlelight, laugh a little, and let one night a year feel genuinely magic rather than merely festive.
The Book That Ran the Whole Party
If you wanted to actually throw one of these parties, there was a good chance you were working from a Bogie Book.
Starting in 1909, the Dennison Manufacturing Company — a paper goods company best known for crepe paper — issued a tentative first edition as little more than a sales catalog, showing off its products and how to decorate a room with them. It didn't catch on right away. Nothing was published in 1910 or 1911. But by 1912, Dennison committed to it as a proper annual booklet, and the Bogie Book became a genuine institution: part catalog, part party planner, full of decorating instructions, game ideas, sample menus, and costume patterns, published almost every year through 1935 (with wartime and Depression-era gaps in 1918 and 1932).
We spent this week going through original scans, and they're worth seeing firsthand — the illustrations alone are a whole aesthetic, all witches and black cats and impossibly elaborate crepe-paper garlands.
If you're planning your own gathering this year, it's a genuinely useful place to start — decorating ideas, party games, and menus that still hold up almost exactly as they were written a century ago.
The Night Before Had Its Own Tradition, Too
October 30th used to carry its own name and its own reputation: Mischief Night, or in some regions, Devil's Night. It was a evening largely devoted to harmless pranks — soaped windows, tipped-over furniture, doorbell-ditching elevated to an art form. Like the masquerade balls, it's a tradition that's almost entirely vanished, pushed out by the same mid-century shift toward a safer, more organized holiday. A handful of regions still mark it in some form, but for most of the country, it's simply the night before Halloween now, with nothing in particular attached to it.
What We're Bringing Back
None of this is really about nostalgia for its own sake. It's about noticing that the version of Halloween most of us grew up with — candy, costumes, a few hours on one evening — is actually a fairly recent and fairly narrow slice of a much richer holiday. The masquerade, the games, the crepe-paper everything, the genuine ceremony of planning something properly instead of grabbing a costume off a rack the week of.
This week, we wanted to bring a little of that back — not instead of the modern holiday, just alongside it. A bit more glamour. A bit more intention. A game played by candlelight instead of a screen. If any of it inspires your own Halloween this year, even in some small way, that's exactly the point.