Friday Fluff: Our First Halloween

Our house all decorated with perfect purple lights, spiders,
and pumpkins. Image by Me (CC BY-NC-ND)

Today's post is going to be short in addition to being late. My husband and I are taking a long weekend (started Wednesday) to visit DC and I am working on a collaborative special guest post with my dear friend Liz. Liz has a master's degree in special education and is pursuing a second master's degree in education policy. I won't ruin the surprise any more than that.

Today I'm going to share a little bit about last Friday: my and my husband's first Halloween in our new house, just like I promised.

 Last week I told ya'll that my neighbors warned my husband and I to expect an onslaught of trick-or-treat-ers so we went out and bought what seemed like an unreasonable amount of candy. We bought 5 large bags from Wal-Mart, each about $15. They were roughly 4lbs each and had 230 candies. It was 1250 candies and about 20lbs in total. We were sure we'd be having little candies for dessert for days after all this--no way we'd give out 1250 candies!

My husband got home at 5:15 and we turned on our lights and our pumpkins and put some candy in a bowl. We then sat out on our porch to wait. We went this way with it because that's what all our neighbors did. At about 5:30 the first family came to our house, two little girls--a princess and a zebra. I gave them each two candies and complimented them on their outfits and we were off to a great start.

Then the children started coming faster and in larger groups. Sometimes five or more on our porch at once. They made little kid traffic jams on our steps (this must be why all the other neighbors put their lawn chairs out on their lawns). By 6:15 our first two bags of candy were gone. Two bags of five gone in less than an hour! We realized if we wanted our candy to last until the end of the evening we'd need to only give each kid one candy (even though that seemed terribly stingy).

The sun started to set, and the children continued. We were barely able to get away from our porch long enough to refill the candy bowl between groups of kids. We saw neighbors pack up their chairs and turn off their light--all their candy given away. We kept going. By 7:30 we could only see two houses other than our own still with lights on, but there were still kids everywhere! At 7:55 we were down to our last five candies. We turned off the lights before another group of kids could come up to the house; the kids were in large enough groups that we were worried we'd only have enough candy for part of a group.

In two and a half hours we gave out over 1200 candies, probably to about 1000 kids!

Then we finally got to eat some dinner (it was left overs night) and watch some TV. The neighbors had warned us it was a lot of kids, but never in my wildest dreams did I think it would be one thousand kids! But while it was a lot of hustle, and I didn't really get a good chance to actually interact with the kids (too many too fast), I'm glad all those kids have a safe neighborhood where they can trick-or-treat (even though it isn't their own), and I'm willing to help make sure that's what my neighborhood stays. I was one of those kids that went to a different neighborhood to trick or treat; I grew up in the sticks and the houses were as much as half a mile apart. My Mom used to take me over to a friend's house and I would trick-or-treat in that neighborhood. So I really appreciate that this is something we're doing to make the holiday happen for these kids.

And the best part of the whole experience might just be that mother nature saved one last trick for us. When we woke up Saturday morning, it was snowing. Snow. On the first day of November. In South Carolina.

Snow falling in my front yard. Image by Me (CC BY-NC-ND)