This really takes me back.

Halloween and elementary school are inextricably linked for some of us. I’ve noted this before, but Halloween was in some ways the most exciting holiday of the school year because we got to wear our costumes to school.

A big part of the Halloween “mood” at school was the decor, which usually took the shape of cardboard cut-out characters and symbols of the season, suitable for pinning to bulletin boards or taping up on walls and doors.

These Beistle Halloween decorations – known as the Halloween Decorama from Beistle – are the most vivid in my mind. And they’ll continue to be familiar images for decades to come, apparently: My son tells me they were familiar to him from his elementary school years, which came a few decades after mine.

The skeleton and cat were hinged so they could be posed. And that flaming skull was freaky.

You can still buy these, by the way, from beistle.com and other online sources. And they still sell the old stuff at vintagebeistle.com.

Beistle, by the way, was founded in 1900 and calls itself “the oldest and largest manufacturer of decorations and party goods in the United States.” It’s based in Shippensburg, PA.