I’ve known  a few people who choose Halloween as their favorite holiday. One neighbor always converted their garage into a haunted house and seemed to come up with a few new ideas each year. They were well past having their own kids at home and the husband just took great pleasure in planning and putting it together. A few female friends have been the incredibly “crafty” type who either make the great costumes or who put together a party with the perfect decorations and clever food. Since son was actually due on Halloween and came a few days early on Oct 25th, for a long time, his parties tended to be Halloween-themed. My “craftiness”, however, was pretty much confined to picking out an appropriate cake to buy. The one extra thing I did when he was young was buy three or four different costumes in the after-Halloween sales and he would play whatever characters they were until the costumes wore out.

Our Halloween decorations for the house aren’t extensive, but we’ve added a few things over the years with mostly a skeleton focus. A couple are scary and there’s a whimsical hanger one for the door. I do always use a witch’s cauldron or jack-o-lantern container for the candy. We generally give out 6-7 large bags worth of candy as there are lots of kids around and I actually have a smaller container with non-chocolate, non-nut for the handful who identify as needing that. (Yes, Hubby rolls his eyes a bit at the gesture.) Anyway, we’re breaking with tradition this year because the Seminole Theater is having the WLRN Radio Theater show of Dracula (adapted for radio by Orson Wells). We are really enjoying that series and I wasn’t sure which way Hubby wanted to go. Turns out he figures the kids do get plenty of candy and they probably won’t have the same production next year. Hmm, I wonder if the theater staff will be in costume?