How we celebrate Halloween

Four years ago this last July Fourth, we moved into our new house. We should have moved from our old house long ago. The neighborhood was going down the toilet at an alarming rate. The thing is, we had stayed for so long because there was a park across the street from us that our children had grown up with. Shawn loved that park and spent many a wonderful day hanging out with the kids from the neighborhood.
They could be a pretty rough crowd but they were almost always nice to Shawn.

Until that "DAY."

Shawn came running home, ran in the house and slammed the door. It took a while to get any useful information out of him. (It always does.) He eventually told me that one of the girls had told him that there was going to be a fight between some "gang" kids and that he needed to run home fast.

Of course I was very grateful to that girl.
The point is, that from that day on Shawn never again went across the street to the park.

Ever.

That was our cue.
We realized it was time to find a Realtor.
Our house was immediately put up for sale.
We couldn't find a pre-existing house we liked.
So we decided to have one built.
We did.
We loved it.
And suffice it to say we live in a much better part of town now.
I guess you could say that we are now among our own kind.

Back to Halloween.

That first Halloween I decided that since we were finally in a good neighborhood we could do what I had wanted to do for years.

Full sized candy bars.

I figured since we would be catering to a better clientele that it would be fun to give out better candy.
I had always given out the "good" stuff anyway. I never once had done the smarties/peanut butter kisses/dum dums, thing. It was always Hershey's or M&M Mars fun size.

But I had always thought it would be cool to go all the way with full size.

It wasn't too hard convincing Don. Well, maybe a little but he came around pretty quickly.

I also had another good idea that he did like.

How about serving hot apple cider to the parents.

I started that August.
Every time a store had a three for a dollar candy sale I stocked up. Before I knew it I had bags and bags of, full sized Snickers, Milkyways, Hershey bars and Hershey with almond bars. Butterfingers, Baby Ruth's, not to mention tons of Skittles, Starbursts and M&Ms.

We also watched the sales for Apple Cider.

Well the big night came. We decided to set up in the Garage. We put a couple of our small card tables out there. We had a great big pot on the stove in the house, heating up the cider and the crock pot outside acting as a nice hot punch bowl.

Oh, I guess I should explain that the extreme Halloween decor of days gone by had somewhat petered out by then.
After the first few years, it became pretty routine.
Most everyone was still happy to have a part in the setting up, but come November 1st, it was a problem to find anyone willing to help tear it all down.
And after a few more years, no one even really wanted to help set it up either.

Don never had really liked all of the dark, creepy, gruesome stuff anyway. I guess our kids had inherited all of the fun from me.

I'm happy to announce however, that we still DO the Graveyard. In fact Don himself set it up the other day.

Well, that first Halloween in our new house was a fantastic success!

I knew that handing out full-size candy would be fun, but Geeez, you would have thought those kids had never seen a real, full sized candy bar before. I don't think there would have been that much excitement if I had decided to hand out one dollar bills.

I know that there were a few that came back for seconds, but what could I do?
And handing out Styrofoam cups of hot cider to the parents?

SCORE!

It was even better the next year.
Apparently we had,
in the course of one Halloween season,
become,
THE COOL HOUSE ON THE BLOCK.

Here we are now ready to celebrate our fifth Halloween in our new house.
This year, I kinda had to win Don over again to the full sized bars. By July there hadn't been a single 3 for 1 sale.
I feared that with the doom and gloom concerning the ECONOMY that 50 cents was the best price I was going to find.
Oh well.
My reasoning is sound.
I figure that we spend a lot more than that on Christmas.
So why not Halloween?

At present I believe I have well over 370 pieces of full sized candy.
I do need to officially count it.
After the second year I decided that it would be handy to know just how many we had given out so I would have a good estimate of how much to buy the next year.
Last year we gave out more than 300 pieces and still ran out.
The big reason is because we have van loads of people from other neighborhoods. It sort of bugs me that we get all of these huge groups of, umm, imports?
Oh well, what can ya do?

I would really like to be able to dress up. But it's just too darn cold out there in the garage. I end up wearing all black and take a black eyeliner pencil and draw stars around my right eye.

Just like Kat Von D's tattoos.

Well, that,
in a nut shell,
is what Halloween has evolved into for me and Don.

It works for us.

Our neighbors tell us each year that we are their favorite house.

One other thing that I've always been really impressed with is just how polite most of the kids are.
The large groups of teenagers? Piece of cake. They are always extremely grateful and respectful.
I figure that, you can't really ask for more than that.

I don't know if there will come a time when those candy bars get just too darn much to keep buying, but I can still rationalize that it's a lot less than what we spend for Christmas.

Halloween Forever!!!!!