Pam’s Pictorama Post: Among the casualties of recent months, while I was spending more time in New Jersey with my mom, has been neglecting my collecting passion. While I did continue to buy this and that (mostly on the occasional scroll through my IG feed), the items then often wandered into Deitch Studio only to be unpacked and put away with less than the usual consideration.

Therefore, these days now one occasionally rises to the surface, like this noisemaker, with no real memory of where it hails from. I believe it was a part of a small group buy of Halloween items or one I just added onto a buy. I am very entertained by it, but doesn’t seem like an item I would have bought on its own. Nonetheless, I am pleased to find it this morning, tucked on a shelf, patiently waiting its turn to bask in the light of a Pictorama post.

The sound of this noisemaker made both of the cats here a bit crazy this morning when I gave it a spin. Kim and I were discussing how, regardless of its actual age, the design seems like it could go back to 1900 or earlier. However, I found a website (Lisa Morton) however which says that although noise makers of this type, called rachet style noisemakers, were found in Germany earlier they became popular in this country in the 1920’s. She says wood ones like this were produced until the 1950’s when they shifted to tin. (To this day one can find a tin and plastic variation sold on the street for New Year’s Eve here in Manhattan, along with old fashion tin horns!)

Noisemakers were designed to chase ghosts and the bogeyman away, an essential to staying safe on Halloween when you were a child. They were an inexpensive accessory addition to the Halloween celebration. I will say that my quiet loving parents never introduced me and my siblings to the simple pleasures of noisemakers. We can draw our own conclusions about that.

Mine here has an odd looking pumpkin head which seems to sport a sort of spotted mushroom cap. (Were he larger I think he’d be a bit frightening or at least creepy in his own right.) He still bears his crisp black paper ruff. The handle is worn very smooth from many years of hands handling.

My foray onto the web researching a bit about Halloween turned up this sort of fascinating reference for the origin of jack-o-lanterns (wowza!) came from as below:

The legend of the most familiar Hallowe’en symbol–a lighted pumpkin–comes from a tale of an old Irish miser named Jack. Jack made several pacts with the devil. He also tricked the devil. When he died, he could not get into Heaven for his sins and because he had tricked the devil, he could not get into Hell. The Devil gave him a coal and Jack placed it in a hollowed out turnip, which lit his way as he wandered the earth until Judgment Day.

(More from this vintage Halloween collecting site can be found here.)

Being a black cat collector I am very Halloween adjacent without really being a Halloween collector. (Some of my other Halloween posts can be found here, here and here.) Halloween collecting is glorious and in another life I would collect everything from the early costumes (still holding out for a great black cat or Felix costume however) to paper decorations. For now though, Pictorama will mostly stay in its black cat lane with only occasional forays into the broader world of Halloween treats and tricks.