Halloweeny

Halloween has come and gone. I am a little disappointed in myself this year because I never got around to putting together a good costume. I have done good the past couple years with getting something cute together for me and Matt, but I just didn’t feel the Halloween vibe this year. I had been planning on having us be Mythbusters, until I realized I didn’t really want to have a beard, and that good lab coats cost about $20 each – way out of our Halloween budget. For a while we were going to be characters from Angry Birds (the cell phone game) but I just never did anything about it. I will blame the fact that we were out of town for the week before Halloween, and I will also say it was because we just didn’t have anywhere to go on Halloween to show off our costumes. It just didn’t ever become a priority.

We did however carve our pumpkins. The pumpkins are really the only thing that survived our disaster of a garden this year. (we had some tomatoes, but a lot of them rotted and they were way late in getting ripe). The pumpkins were not ripe, so we made some green Jack-O-Lanterns, but it was still fun. I was very brave and pulled the pumpkin guts out all by myself this year even though Matt offered to do it for me.

I am also not a huge Halloween decorator. I have some light up mummies that my sister Val and I made at a relief society thing back when we lived at home. (sadly, probably the last time I went to a relief society thing). And I have a light up plastic pumpkin I bought when I lived in an apartment and wanted something festive, but that is about it. So we also picked all the pumpkins in our garden and lined them up on the porch. Matt was not going to be content with just pumpkins out there, so he added some old acorn squash we hadn’t eaten from a few weeks ago, an apple and an onion. It made me laugh.

Then we settled into watching scary old movies and running up the stairs to hand out candy every time the doorbell rang. We ended up going to my sister’s house to watch movies later that night, and I was feeling really bad about leaving the poor trick-or-treaters candyless. We decided we would set out a basket with some candy in it for them to pick up as they came by. I don’t remember this ever working when I was a kid. I remember going up to a lot of empty bowls with a “take one” sign. So I figured when we put it out we would make one or two kids really happy, and the rest would wonder why they walked up the entire front yard for a stupid empty basket.

I was pleasantly surprised when we got home that night and there was still some candy in the basket. Obviously these kids are better behaved than the kids in my neighborhood growing up. I was impressed.

So overall, it was a good Halloween. I am resolved to get a jump start on planning my costume for next year. Any ideas what we should be?