Well, my namesake holiday has come and gone and it's time to take accounts.
I lost the first 2 weeks of October to the flu and most of the rest of the month to a head cold. So it was a light year for decoration. I ended up getting all of my homemade headstones out as well as the few store-bought ones as well. I got some diamond paintings and a few other wall decorations up, and that was about it. I just had no energy. I got some video up on my channel of what I did get up, but it's pretty bare-bones compared to usual. Halloween with the Hallowqueen part 1 and Halloween with the Hallowqueen part 2. Silver lining though - it should be pretty fast to disassemble.
I was pretty worried about how many kids we were going to get for this year. Logically I knew there would be fewer trick or treaters overall, but I figured with more houses declining participation due to the pandemic it may force the kids to go further afield for candy - and my house is lit up like a spooky beacon. Money's been tight since, well, I havn't been working, and I ended up cobbling the treat bags together with new-bought candy, but most of the non-candy treats were leftovers from previous years, and so were the bags. I ended up needing to use the very little bags once the bigger ones ran out, and then ran out of those leaving me with about 70 bags. That's about what we normally get, and I had a lot of extra loose candy if it came to that.
Day of, I'm having a panic attack because I feel so completely underprepared. I sang my way through the worst of it, and then did a flurry of last-minute decoration, getting the fog machine out and setting it up. I asked the girls if they wanted to go trick or treating by themselves, and they jumped at it. So for the first year in a dozen, I stayed home and handed out candy. I used a grabber arm and handed them out and got lots of compliments on the decorations. We got, I'm guessing about 50 kids, but they were so excited to be out. I was a little surprised that most of them were not wearing masks beyond the ones that their costumes came with, and they didn't seem to be social distancing much if at all.
A couple of costumes stood out. There was the most precious little toddler who was just barely two in a strawberry costume. She clearly did not understand what the heck was going on, but her mom and I talked for a minute. Her birthday was in October, so I introduced her to Emily, who had not left yet and showed the mom her child's future. A little guy came up in a pizza costume, so I pretended to ask my husband if he had ordered delivery, which confused him since he couldn't see the door from where I was. And then there was a whole group of youths in morph suits with LED masks that were fairly impressive as a group costume.
My kids didn't get very far. The dino costume was too cumbersome and awkward for Emily to move in much. They did get over to Grandma's at least, but I don't think they were even gone an hour. They had fun though.
Brian had the chef at his golf course make us a lovely dinner to bring home, and we watched the Mandalorian while we handed out candy. I was hoping for a bottle of wine, but apparently so were most of the city, the liquor store was so badly lined up that my husband didn't make it there. 11 years and counting of wedded bliss.
It was not Halloween as usual. Nothing is as usual in this landscape. But it is what it is, and those who participated seemed to have fun. And that's really what matters in the end. And now the really scary thing is happening south of the border - the US presidential election. Get out and vote!
