Happy Halloween!

UPDATE: We were told to expect about 45 trick-or-treaters. We got over 80! Next year we hope to add more. :-). Happy Halloween!

Well, here we are, our first Halloween in our new house. It's taken me a couple weeks to get all the Halloween stuff up. A lot of it isn't up. Nobody else in the neighborhood decorated that much.

Everything is classy, clean, minimal. They mostly put pumpkins around their yard, never carved into Jack-o-lanterns, and sometimes set atop a bale of hay, to allude to a folksy, charming nod to Fall. It's lovely . . . Yawn. I have seen 3 houses that have more than pumkins or hay. A couple have craft store folksy scarecrows that are so not scary in the least. One porch has spider webbing on it and a single ghost hanging on a flagpole. I'm told they don't get many trick-or-treaters in this neighborhood.

Here's an idea for attracting trick-or-treaters, decorate, turn your lights on, and they will come. I know I go overboard for Halloween, but if you build it, they will come. And Halloween is such an exciting part of childhood. If you're young, there's the wonder of being up past bedtime, being outside after dark. When you're a little older, there's the friendships and memories made with friends as you scramble to come up with costumes, hoping to see that person you have a crush on, while you're out that night, having laughs and scares, and wonderful stories to share at school the next day.

If you're a little older, it's your first taste of freedom, that one night a year, where you're allowed to run the streets of your hometown. So I resist giving in to the "trunk or treat" in parking lots, "because it's safer," it's "easier." I stand firm against the religious co-opting of the night and turning it into a docile "Harvestfest," taking all the pagan elements out of it. It's Halloween damn it! There's supposed to be an element of danger, fear, and fun. So I'm building it again this year. I don't know how long we'll be here, but while we are, I will show them how it's done. My neighbor confessed, her teenaged son loves our decorations. She said he always begged her to decorate like this when he was little, but she never did. It was too much work. Well,I'm showing her son how it's done, and I hope when he has a family, he will decorate his home how he always wanted it when he was little.