Reflections The Day After

Halloween has come and gone. I learned a lot this year, and I hope this newfound wisdom is something that I will carry into the next October 31st. Let me share what I learned.

It’s a lot more fun putting up the decorations than it is taking them down – It’s hard to tell from the picture, but John designed an elaborate stage of cauldrons, smoke machines, black lights, spider webs, skeletons and generally spooky decorations. He hung a scary phantom in our tree, and used twine to drop it on unsuspecting passersby. He also dressed up in a frightening costume and stood pressed against the front of our house under cover of darkness and smoke. This was the perfect location from which to jump out and terrify all of the little kiddies. The kids (even grown ones) loved it. Now we I get to take it all down. Last night it seemed well worth it. Today when we're I'm de-decorating it might not seem that way.

My boys want me to play monster, but don’t want me to actually look like a monster – They liked me in this costume as long as I talked like me and acted silly. The first hint of spookiness from me and they ran terrified from the room.

You’re never too old for Halloween – The one second from the left is my grandma. She’s in her 80s. The rest are my Aunt Patti, my cousin Megan and, the only one dressed like a girl, my cousin Clayton. What a good sport he was. And that's my husband scaring my grandma.

Fake eyebrows are hazardous – Just ask my Aunt Patti. When she took hers off, she pulled most of her real eyebrows and a fair amount of skin with them. It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eyebrow.

No matter how cute the food is, the boys still just want to eat candy – I spent not a lot of time but enough time making these cute mummy dogs from Pillsbury. I thought the boys would certainly eat them because they love hot dogs, and what’s better than a plain old hot dog if not one dressed like a mummy with a face on it? Think again. Luke’s dinner consisted of two bites of cinnamon toast and half a bag of candy. The adults enjoyed the mummy dogs anyway.

The joke is all in the delivery – I didn’t know this until recently, but the tradition of telling a joke before you get your candy is apparently a St. Louis thing. When we talk to people that have just moved here, or people in other cities, no one does this. In St. Louis, you better have a joke ready if you want candy. Luke made his jokes up on his own as we were heading toward the first house. This guaranteed the candy giver would never have heard the joke before, that the joke made no sense, and that the joke wasn't funny. I kept telling the neighbors, “It’s not the joke that’s funny. It’s all in the delivery.”

Pumpkins do not burn – My Uncle Kiley has some wonderfully fun and perfectly boy experiments. He read somewhere that if you soak a roll of toilet paper in kerosene, put it in a carved pumpkin, and light it, you will get a flame 3 feet tall that burns for 45 minutes. He didn’t have kerosene so used lantern fluid instead. We weren’t sure what to expect, so when he lit it we had fire extinguishing materials available. The pumpkin didn’t catch fire or roll down the driveway, and the toilet paper burned just as expected. It was the perfect Halloween boy magnet. Jack even did a spooky Halloween fire dance.