Halloween

Quick side note: something about being 8.99 months pregnant brings out my sarcastic un-amused side. Sorry. I’m not a naturally cynical or vindictive person, I’ve just been pregnant, nauseous, exhausted, and completely uncomfortable for 276 days straight. It wears on a body. So the following views on Halloween are probably as exaggerated from Normal Shaina’s thoughts as my giant stomach is exaggerated from Normal Shaina’s stomach [maybe]:

 
                                                                 [5wks vs. 38wks]

This belly was not feeling very festive on October 31st, 2014. But it survived Halloween anyhow, somehow. I decided that “some are born liking Halloween, some adore Halloween, and others have Halloween thrust upon them.” I put myself in the third category. Living in the Halloween Hotspot of Grandview definitely thrusts way more of the costumed candy customs onto me than I would normally choose for myself. I know I don’t have to participate, but I don’t want to be that lame. I just wish that we could drive to our ward’s trunk or treat, have a pleasant hour and a half of Halloweeniness with our friends and then come home and be done with it. Instead we had the first trick or treaters ringing our doorbell incessantly during dinner at 5:15pm. I did my best to put on a cheerful face and say nice things about the costumes while passing out expensive sugar to mostly ungrateful Spidermen and Elsas. Thankfully I think I tricked most treaters in that way.

Just like last year, I purchased two bags of 150-piece Hershey’s variety mix candy at Costco, for a total of $30—the max I could bear to invest in the stuff. We gave one piece per person, and when Jeff was at the door he refused to give candy to high schoolers. The candy was gone in 2 hours. When Jay and Rose got back from trick or treating with their modest 1/3-full buckets, I let them each pick 5 pieces of candy to save and one to eat right away, and then they willingly dumped their candy into the bowl to hand out. And then they happily handed out candy the rest of the night. Biased parent alert: Jay and Rose are AWESOME! As usual, I don’t know how much of it is nature and how much is nurture. But they are great. Anyways, if you add up those numbers, we had at least 350 trick or treaters at our door in two hours. We put up our “out of candy” signs at 7:20pm, when the neighborhood was still positively crawling with trick or treaters.

So really, we only had to deal with invasive trick or treating for 2 hours (unless  you count the kids who rang the doorbell in spite of our out-of-candy signs). But we could still hear all that movement outside and it felt like we had to batten the hatches and hide from the candy-seekers once we they had cleaned us out.

WHEW. It wasn’t all bad:

 

Harry Potter and Cinderella were excited. This year I did not have the brain cells to invent costumes for the kids like I normally enjoy doing, so it was off to Goodwill for us. And we scored these great costumes for $5 each! I have an inexplicable prejudice against mass-produced store-bought costumes, but I was pleased that Jay and Rose did not look too generic. And they loved their costumes. Rose felt so beautiful, I could tell. Jay felt powerful. He drew on his own scar, nice and thick. Uh-oh, these costumes were so easy and inexpensive that I may go back to Goodwill again next year…who needs homemade costumes anyways?

[I may or may not have snacked on a Reese’s or two while I was handing out candy]

The cousins visited us! Layne was a mouse and Tate was a cat. And yes, Jeff dressed up in his Regency tailcoat that I made him for Valentine’s Day this year. He wore it to school all day too. All he needs are some polished Hessian boots (and maybe a cravat that’s not made of an old curtain hem) and he’d be a true gentleman of the ton. Yes I’m reading a Georgette Heyer right now. Ok, maybe homemade costumes are worth it after all.

Maybe Halloween isn’t so bad after all either.