Friday, October 31, 2003
What I have discovered is that Halloween is not so much a single day, but a week's worth of activities - at least it is if you are a parent with small children in our neighbourhood.
A few weeks ago Vanessa and her mother decided on her costume, which was to be Little Bo Peep. We dug out the nursery rhyme books looking for illustrations and found a few that was given over to GrandMa Jean who volunteered to whip something together. Originally little Annie was going to wear Vanessa's old Unicorn costume, but Jennifer said that if Vanessa was going to be Little Bo Peep, then it only made sense to make Annie one of her sheep. So Jean also ended up sewing together a fluffy sheep costume as well.
The parties for the kids began the weekend before, at a special "haunted house” that was constructed, as well as associated parties at Vanessa's schools, the Drop In Centre where Annie often goes to and so on. By the time Halloween Day rolled around, Annie's costume had suffered from overuse, and in the end a neighbour loaned us a small clown costume to dress Annie up in on Halloween night itself.
Erika and I took it in turns, with her heading out to lead the kids around the block while I stayed at home and doled out the treats, and then we switched later. Vanessa ended up going around with a friend of hers who was tended to by another set of parents (Annie was seriously slowing her down), so I ended up taking Annie around most of the time.
Annie had done this last year, but she couldn't have remembered much, if anything, about it. But she quickly got the idea: go up to the door, say "trick or treat” and after getting some candy say "thank you”. I usually hefted her up and down most of the stairs she had to traverse to get to her goal, and everybody loves getting the smaller children like Annie (who ended up getting, by weight, about as much treats as her older sister, who was out longer).
There were several houses that had gone to great lengths to build haunted houses in our immediate neighbourhood. The interesting thing is that they tended to draw the trick-or-treaters, and since there were no fancy displays on our street, we had less overall "business” as a result. Annie did get scared a few times by some of the adult-oriented frights going on, and there were a few times when she came running back to me at full speed. She had a grin on her face and a heavy bag of candy, but being with Dad was definitely safer than being near the guy dressed as a skeleton. (On the flipside, Vanessa is now very blasé about the artificial frights, and professes not to be fazed by any of them. I know this is not completely the case, but it is cute to see her put a brave face on it).
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