Publisher’s Perspective

Chad Koenen

I don’t know if there were more than a handful of times my family purchased an actual Halloween costume for me for Halloween. There were a few purchased costumes, like a football player with shoulder pads none-the-less and some ninja costume with a sword, but most of my costumes growing up were of the homemade kind (at least that’s the way I remember it). 

One particular costume I remember was when my parents dressed me up as Batman with a homemade costume. In order to achieve the look I wore all black with a black stocking hat with two ears on top (you know the bat look right, even though most people thought I was a bank robber). Back when I was younger, which seems like an eternity ago, homemade costumes were fairly common. When Halloween was done those homemade costumes could be broken down into sweatshirts for school or sticking hats with ears for the winter months. 

In fact, there were a lot of sideways looks when you showed up to the community Halloween party, or at school for your classroom party, with a store bought costume. You know the look, like where does your family get off paying all that money for a costume look. 

Of course when you make your own costume you typically had the 2-3 minute explanation of what the costume was suppose to look like—if you needed a longer explanation you knew your costume looked nothing like your intended purpose. 

A few weeks ago, given the supply chain concerns, we started looking at Halloween costumes for our kids. Today it is just easier, and in many ways less expensive, to simply buy a Halloween costume as opposed to taking the time to make your own. While Dani is pretty crafty I am not sure any costume I laid my hands on would make it out the door without falling apart, much less surviving a night of trick or treating. 

While the store bought costumes look like their intended purchase, it is sad to think that most kids won’t ever have a memory to share with their kids someday about their Halloween costume gone bad. After all, I still enjoy looking at old pictures of garbage bags that were utilized as a cape and ski masks that doubled as a Darth Vader costume.

Deer hunting 

opens Saturday

Every March we hear the statistics concerning how much productivity and work will be lost due to workers following the March Madness basketball tournament. Every November, a similar slow down of work occurs in Minnesota, especially in this part of the state, when it comes to deer hunting. 

Now I am not a hunter, nor do I pretend to be one either, but every year about this time it seems like one cannot talk to another person for more-than a few minutes without the subject of deer hunting coming up. There are schools in the state that take Friday off and many businesses close down for a portion of the week to allow hunters the opportunity to spend the day getting ready for hunting, instead of day dreaming about their time in the field while at work. 

It is a great weekend for this area, if for no other reason than it helps eliminate some of the deer that keep trying to run into my car while I drive 55 mph down the road. 

A few years ago when I was driving to work at 6 a.m. I has to slow down for a group of deer. I was maybe going 15 mph at the time, and a deer literally ran into the back of my car. It scared the poop out of me as my coffee spilled all over my leg and before I could open my door to apologize for getting in its way, the idiot deer was already into the field. Fortunately there was no damage to my car because I’m not sure how realistic it would have been to explain to my wife that the damage to the back of my car was caused by a deer running into the back of my car at a near standstill, while the other deer in the herd walked slowly in front of my car. 

I don’t doubt that the deer that ran into the back of my car ended up as a new decoration at the home of a local resident. After all, if it was stupid enough to run into my nearly parked car once, there is a good chance he tried to show off his athletic prowess again in another epic fail. 

That being said, we want to continue a tradition in the New York Mills Dispatch of running deer hunting pictures in our newspaper. All you have to do is drop off a copy of your picture at the newspaper office, email it to chad@henningadvocate.com or share it with us on our Facebook page. We will run all of the pictures we receive in an upcoming issue of the Dispatch 

The picture can be of a doe or buck, big or small. All we need to know is who got the deer and who is in the picture. We always enjoy hearing the stories of how the deer were harvested, and each year we receive a number of comments from readers about how much they enjoy seeing the pictures of area hunters.

If you have any questions feel free to give me a call at (218) 385-7720 at any time.