Trick or Treat

For me the real joy of Halloween is not gruesome, scary decorations.  I stopped at a Halloween store last weekend for one little item and could not believe the amount of gory and grotesque...and animated decorations.

For me the joy has always been in the dressing up as a child or getting the little ones all dressed up as some other character, adding layers under said costume, taking photos and then armed with flashlight and trick-or-treat bag....stumbling through the leaf strewn yards and up the steps of a lighted porch  filled with pumpkins. "Trick-or-Treat"...and then the pay off...chocolate!!  Any endeavor that ends in chocolate has to have some value.

When tired little legs and heavy bags were evident, we would trudge home and struggle to get the costumes off before the candy eating commenced.  I will never forget the year Alyssa discovered candy.  I had tried to keep candy from her when she was little...trying to be a good mother.  The Halloween when she was 2, we arrived home from trick-or-treating and she settled at the top of our raised ranch stairs as I was trying to get Cara out of her costume and me out of mine...and she started eating her candy.  I looked over when she was on her 3rd or 4th piece. She just sat there on the floor...half in her costume, half out... quietly eating candy with this expression of discovery and pure joy on her face, as if to say "where have you been all my life?"  But that isn't what is fun about getting back home from trick or treating.  We loved when the doorbell would ring...and we would get to see all the adorable little ones and get to give out the candy.

No shrieks and screams of terror at our house...  Just cute, often themed, character costumes, pumpkins and of course candy.  Those are my memories of Halloween.  I don't really get trick or treaters anymore.   I have no little ones to take trick-or-treating these days.   I kind of miss it.  Although, it is quite a bit cheaper.

But I have my memories of costumes and characters from days gone by that are sweeter than that chocolate.

"Once in a young lifetime one should be allowed to have as much sweetness as one can possibly want and hold."

~ Judith Olney