Well, tonight’s the night. We’ve had our Halloween decorations up for a couple of weeks now, and– like Christmas– all of the preparation always comes down to one final day. One of my favorite decorations is this little construction-paper craft that Alex made when he was something like five years old:
I don’t even know how it’s survived this long, but every year we tape it up on a wall somewhere.
Since Alex is 17 and Kyra is 16, neither of them felt like it would be appropriate to go trick-or-treating. Alex went over to a friend’s house where they were planning to jump off the roof (on to a crash pad) to scare kids. Uhh. I don’t think it happened, although it reminded me of the good old days when Dirk and I camped out on the roof of his house on Halloween and whenever someone approached the front porch, we’d drop a Cabbage Patch Kid who was tied to a noose. Hilarious! Kyra went to a friend’s house to watch a movie– apparently it was going to be something scary but ended up being The Dark Knight Rises. Go figure.
Anyway, Zack is the last trick-or-treater in the family, so he spent all of ten minutes planning and creating his costume. Behold… the hobo!
Basically these were some random old items I had stashed in our costume box in the crawlspace. After about five minutes he realized the afro wasn’t going to be a lot of fun as he walked the neighborhood, so it came off and he was basically some guy wearing torn jeans and the remains of a flannel bed sheet. Ahh, creativity these days.
I quit work a little early this afternoon because we’d planned to carve pumpkins as a family. Well, it turned out no one actually wanted to do it. We had five nice pumpkins on our front porch, so I went ahead and did a couple myself.
First there’s the classic one that I do every year:
Then we had a tall skinny one so I really went wild and did something completely different:
The other three? They sat on the porch as boring old pumpkins.
Despite the lack of enthusiasm from the fam about this holiday, I always think it’s a good time. Happy Halloween!