The Best 90s Fall Traditions We Still Miss

1. Halloween Costume Kits From a Bag

Long before Pinterest ruined Halloween with its impossibly creative expectations, costume selection came in crinkly plastic bags that ranged from "Generic Superhero" to "Vague Princess" to "Something That Might Be a Ninja But Could Also Be a Burglar." Each costume came complete with a thin plastic smock and a mask you could barely breathe in, complete with an elastic string that snapped before you made it past the first house.

2. New Saturday Morning Cartoons

Fall meant fresh cartoon lineups, making Saturday mornings prime television real estate. You plopped yourself down in front of the tube at the crack of dawn, poured a mountain of sugary goodness, Captain Crunch, and settled in to spend hours with your talking animal friends "Scooby-Doo," "Alvin and the Chipmunks" and the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles."

3. School Book Fairs

The Scholastic Book Fair was a literary lottery, where your five-dollar budget could either buy you three “Goosebumps” books or one holographic bookmark that you'd treasure forever. Walking into that transformed library felt like entering a magical marketplace where books sat next to scented erasers and those weird gel pens that never worked but looked absolutely essential.

4. Carving Pumpkins with Plastic Tools

Those neon-orange saws bent faster than a Capri Sun straw, but somehow they were considered cutting-edge pumpkin tech. You’d spend an hour sawing out a jagged grin while elbow-deep in pumpkin guts, wondering why your masterpiece always looked less spooky and more haunted Picasso.

5. Blockbuster Movie Nights

As the days got shorter, renting a movie on Saturday night required real strategy and backup plans. You’d sprint to Blockbuster hoping that the scary movie you wanted was actually in stock. If it wasn’t, you stalked the return bin like a hawk, praying someone just dropped it off or spent 20 minutes wandering the aisles hoping to score the real thrill...finding that one copy of the movie everyone wanted, tucked behind three copies of something nobody had ever heard of.

6. TGIF Lineup

Friday nights were the holy grail of sitcom lineups thanks to ABC’s TGIF lineup of “Full House,” “Family Matters,” “Boy Meets World” and “Perfect Strangers.” You circled it in the TV Guide like sacred scripture and spent the whole summer waiting to see if DJ got the boy or if everyone would finally admit Larry was the real weirdo. It was the original streaming binge only with commercials and the agony of waiting seven whole days for the next episode.

7. McDonald’s Halloween Buckets

October at McDonald's meant those iconic orange jack-o'-lantern buckets that somehow convinced parents everywhere that processed chicken nuggets were worth it for the premium plastic container. Years later, you'd find these buckets in random corners of your parents' house, still faintly smelling like old french fries and childhood magic.

8. TV Specials Before Streaming

Appointment television at its finest. In the pre-streaming era, special television events were actually special because you had exactly one chance to catch them, and then they'd disappear into the ether until next year. Fall wasn’t complete without "The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror" or "It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown." If you missed it, better luck next year.

The Best ’90s Fall Traditions We Secretly Miss