Via Starwars.com:

For me, Halloween always began in a store aisle.

I would be shopping with with my mom, sometime in September, and would notice that there was more candy. My mom would push me along. It wasn’t time, not yet, but there was a sense — some sort of subtle disturbance in the retail ether — that something was on its way.

As October came, an aisle would appear in those stores. Almost out of nowhere. What had been there before? Swimwear? Porch furniture? Sunscreen? It didn’t matter.

The costumes had arrived.

Hung on racks and facing us like works of splotchy high art, the new costumes represented the biggest possible choice a kid could have. It was the question we repeated to each other hundreds of times: What are you going to be? It was the only fashion statement that mattered. Below all the costumes of Jaws, Hong Kong Phooey, and the Six-Million-Dollar Man, were the flimsy cardboard boxes they came in. They had see-through plastic on the tops so we could study the masks inside. We didn’t know who Ben Cooper was, but we thought he was just about the greatest man who had ever lived.

Then Star Wars came. And Halloween changed.

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