Friday, November 02, 2007

The Kids in Their Costumes

If I had my way, I’d just ignore Halloween altogether, but we live in one of those neighborhoods where people from other neighborhoods drive their kids over here to go trick-or-treating and my kids really like to dress up in costumes. So, we compromise somewhat, I guess. Our kids do dress up and go around the neighborhood with Daddy and I usually stay home and pass out treats. For one night, at least, we see more of our neighbors than usual. We don’t celebrate the spooky and gory, but we do let them go begging for treats.

One thing I don’t understand is what a big deal Halloween has become. People in our neighborhood decorate their houses more for it than for Christmas and it starts beginning of October. And the decorations are just plain icky and weird. Who wants spiderwebs, ghouls and graveyards on prominent display? Actually, I can understand it. It’s called marketing. The stores make a lot of money off our candy and costumes and junk.

When I was growing up, I don’t remember it being all that big of a thing. I certainly don’t remember people having all the hooplah decorations all over their yards for the whole month of October. Usually it was just the week of October 31 and only the little kids went trick-or-treating. Now we get big ol’ teenagers coming by repeatedly throughout the evening and we have to tell them to save some for the little kids – my father-in-law made the older kids do some kind of trick for a treat. That went over well. Some of the teenagers were pretty funny and creative with the “tricks” they came up with just for a few pieces of candy, and we had quite a few handsprings and gymnastics moves across the front lawn.

And, I know that for some people Halloween is THE big issue and all and I can understand that, and, yes, I know all the arguments for and against participating, but for our family, we decided we could let them dress up in cute little costumes and visit the neighbors and carve a pumpkin, but the creepy, icky stuff is left out. Anyway, like I said, Halloween would be a big, fat nothing if it were only up to me.

So, all my little disclaimers aside, I just have to share the pictures of the costumes the kids wore.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Boo is so cute!

I wonder about Halloween, too. When I was a kid there weren't tons of decorations, either. Several houses in our neighborhood had halloween lights and lawn decorations this year. Just like Christmas! It's weird, isn't it?