Altogether Ooky

So there's this local tradition where kids are supposed to dress up in costumes and demand candy from strangers. In Connecticut, where I grew up, there was a similar holiday called Halloween, and it was held on October 31. Where we live now, they practice something similar, except it starts around October 20, and the candy-eating lasts until about Thanksgiving. First, there is the making of costumes. Then, there is the making of a second set of costumes for the school parades--don't ask me why the kids can't just go in their trick-or-treating costumes, but our school assigns themes like "Environment," "The Human Body," and "Politics" which may or may not be compatible with your own Halloween themes (e.g. "What Your Sister Wore Last Year" and "This Was On Sale").

The first night of trick-or-treating occurs sometime in the last week of October, and takes place in a church parking lot. This allows your children pass through an entire cycle of sugar highs and lows before Halloween even begins, thus insuring that their sugar crash after October 31 will be all the more spectacular.

Speaking of crashes, K. and I sacrificed a couple of white shirts and went as a couple of grownup boogeymen--Global Warming and the Economy:
And yes, we're aware that K. looks pretty morose in this picture. In light of our gloomy statistics we were both supposed to be frowning, but I forgot to turn off my default picture settings. Our disparate faces still make sense if you pretend that K. is a polar bear and I am a bankruptcy attorney.

We hoped to grow our own pumpkins this year, but we didn't water them enough and the biggest grew to about the size of a baseball. Instead, we bought some from a small farm located smack in the middle of an upscale neighborhood near our house. For family home evening K. helped Lucy carve her trick-or-treating monster, Sage and I carved a ghost, and Ian carved "two Pokemon and two Musms." Ian just explained to me that "Musm" is his own term for a Mutant Organism. I was lucky enough to find a pumpkin shaped like Boris Karloff, so my carving pretty much took care of itself. (Trivial Aside: Did you know that Boris Karloff's real name was William Pratt? Also, he wore lifts. What a faker.)

I forgot to comment on the kids' costumes. Nora was our fourth child to wear the (suprisingly clean) white unicorn costume, Lucy wore Sage's Sleeping Beauty dress, Sage was a very winsome cheerleader, and Ian went as the Invisible Pedestr--er, I mean--the Grim Reaper. Not pictured is the plastic scythe that completed his eerie look. More that a few houses saw Ian's featureless shroud peering through the front window while slowly tapping it with his scythe. It suprises me that he didn't get more candy.