All Hallow's Eve

With Halloween now a thing of the past along with Breaking Bad and what felt like the only remaining hours of sunshine, I'm happy to look forward to the holiday season.  I like Halloween just fine, but once I've eaten all of the Reese's peanut butter cups from the candy stash, the actual act of traipsing around in the cold leaves something to be desired.  But even after offering our hand-out candy to the boys in exchange for staying in the warm house, the boys insisted that the show go on, even in the cold.

And was it ever cold.  Even my jack-o-lanterns, who had been outdoors before I'd gutted them, wouldn't stay lit against the strong wind that blew all night. 

 It had been raining off and on all day, so as we trudged from door to door with numb fingers, we added numb toes to the mix as we splashed in puddles of semi-frozen rainwater too dark to see. 

If you have children, though, you know that the pursuit of candy will provide enough inner warmth to melt the ice caps, so we continued on from one house to the next.  When we reached one house with a large scarily-masked dummy on the porch, the boys marched right up to the door just in time for the dummy to reveal itself as a middle-school aged boy, who jumped up with a shout. 

Cael spun to look at him, confused, while Graham tucked tail and sprinted back to us as though there were a vicious lion in hot pursuit, only to trip over the edge of the sidewalk and fly through the air before skidding across the (mercifully) wet grass and coming to a stop at our feet.

There were no tears, just a lot of shock and several suspicious glances toward anyone whose face was not in clear sight. 

"What is that?  Is that going to scare me?"

"No, Bubba.  That's just another boy trick-or-treating."

"Will that scare me?"

"No, honey.  That's a spider decoration.  It's not real."

"But what about that?!?"

"That's a mailbox, Graham."

If the goal had been candy, it was a very successful mission.  My actual goal was a fun experience, however, and I think this Halloween was something of a wash.  We arrived home cold, wet and hungry, and after letting the boys choose a couple of treats from the stockpile, they were hit with the inevitable sugar rush and chose to burn that energy by beating on each other for awhile. 

I'd secretly hoped that by dressing Graham as a bag of M&Ms and Cael as a doctor, the universe would have found a way to put the equation in my kids' heads that too much candy = getting sick, but the concept got distorted along the way.  Instead, after I caught them stealing candy from the cache at 5am on Friday morning, the "if, then" theorum became "if your brother takes your Smarties, then pound on him until he requires medical attention". 

But here we are on Monday, wiser, heavier and much more tired thanks to Daylight Savings Time, and I can say with absolute certainty that I'll do it all over again next year just to make them smile.

As long as there are peanut butter cups.