First up, we have the trunk or treat at our church. We joined up with a friend of ours and her family and came as the characters from Clue. Those of us that weren't characters from the game wore a weapon on the front and a room on the back. It was a lot of fun building the costumes. The payoff was a little more disappointing. The group costume competition at our church is generally pretty fierce, especially between the Waltons (our allies this year) and the Beatty's. However, for the double whammy this year, the Beatty's couldn't make it, and there was no group category. Ah well, the kids had fun anyway.
Next up, we have the 8th Annual Hawks Halloween Party. We had a really good turnout this year with four other families attending. The Waltons were coming, so we all donned our Clue outfits, only to find that there was a little miscommunication and they had decided to come in individual costumes. With less than half of the Clue board represented, our costumes needed quite a bit of explanation. We really slacked off on the pictures this year. I didn't even get a good one of the food spread. The funnest part was using dry ice on our blood and eyeball punch. What I didn't realize is that putting more dry ice in after the bubbles died down would eventually freeze the punch. We had punch-encased chunks of dry ice fused to the bottom of the bowl by the time I was done. Good times. Anyway, the bulk of the pictures were of the apple bobbing, a mainstay of our annual festivities.
Here we have Zoe's costume for her preschool's Bible-themed costume party.
And last we have the girls all dressed up before attacking the neighborhood in some good old fashioned candy extortion.
I was very disappointed in our neighborhood this year. About half of the houses with exterior lights on, the traditional "I'm-giving-out-candy" symbol, didn't answer the door or didn't have candy. Even those were few and far between. The only reason the girls filled their buckets was because everyone was handing out handfuls of candy. They seemed to pick up on the other disappointing trend, a marked decrease in the amount of trick-or-treaters. Last year we had almost 200 kids raid our candy. This year we didn't even get a fourth of that. I'm wondering if it's a cultural thing. One of the houses we stopped at had their lights on, but there was a nice hispanic lady leaving. She nodded to us and directed us to the door, so we figured candy awaited. After waiting for a few moments, a hispanic gentleman came around the corner of the townhouse complex bearing fast food. It looked like he just made a food run. He stuttered out, "Ah! Halloween! Uh, no, uh, candy! Wait, wait, wait!" as he started rooting around in his pockets. I was about to usher the girls away, wanting no part of whatever candy he had stashed there, when I saw what he retrieved. He had a wad of $1 bills, off of which he peeled three notes for my girls. I told him he didn't have to do it, but he insisted. Whether or not the candy was a cultural thing, I'll say this, that was a durn nice thing for him to do.
Anyway, I'm going to get these up on Facebook, too. You should be able to get to larger versions of the pictures by clicking somewhere in the slideshows if you want copies for yourself (I'm looking your way, Mom.) If any of you want originals, let me know in email.
