Haaaalloween

I am not usually one to blow my own horn, but I think my pumpkin turned out awesome this year, thanks to Google images. I just "googled" jack o lanterns and liked this one and "Bob's your uncle." There it is!

Speaking of "Bob's your uncle", if you haven't seen The World's Fastest Indian on DVD starring Anthony Hopkins, you should. It's a delightful movie, based on fact, about a 67 year old man from New Zealand who wants to ride his motorcycle in Utah's annual Bonneville Salt Flats race. I've been trying to get my kids to watch it for years. I get no respect!

Anyway, back to Halloween. I'm posting, after a very long hiatus, to validate that we had 76 trick-r-treaters - our most ever - and topped Missy's next-door neighborhood by 36, which has never happened. I don't even know how to begin to analyze that, but it even ran through my mind that maybe the economy had something to do with it. That's how focused we are on the subject with the election today. People without jobs and children starved for candy because of it.

On Halloween we have a tradition of eating chili and cornbread and then talking to my Mom when it's over to compare how many kids we had. Mom has been sort of complaining for several years now about how their aging neighborhood doesn't get many trick-r-treaters anymore. True, they only had 26. They love Halloween. And until this year, they have been carving a pumpkin - yikes! At 88 and 86. This year, though, Cheryl bought them the plug-in variety.

Our neighbors up the hill on Broadwell had their usual display of life-size Halloween characters, some of which are motion sensitive and light up and say scary things. We walked Mojo up to see them on the 31st and our neighbor Paul was still hooking some up, so we got a chance to introduce ourselves and ask him where he had gotten his "friends." He said just from all over the place - Spencer's Gifts, Lowe's, the Halloween tent that sets up in the Mall parking lot, Walgreen's, etc. I wonder if the little kids skip that house as they might look pretty scary to them!

While watching all the parents who come with their children (it was a nice mild night I might mention), I thought about halloweening when I was a kid. We certainly never had a parent with us. I asked a friend on fb (facebook) whom I've known since I was 5 if she remembered ever having a parent with her, and she said no and the only thing she remembered about it was on the next street over from ours, the people had a bowl of pennies and you got to reach in and take as many as you could hold. I remember that now too. How many pennies do you think a 7 or 8 year old could hold? Not enough to wipe you out financially, but the teenagers that come would sure try . . . as only a teenager can!

I do have this not-important piece of info for you, though. When given the choice of Reese's peanut butter cup, a Hershey's chocolate bar or a packaged Rice Krispee treat (the chocolate ones are incredible), the resounding fav was: Hershey's chocolate! I thought it was going to be Reese's. Now I know what I will buy next year. Because what I don't give out I can use to make a "some-more" in the microwave. Yuuuum!