I love Halloween! Always have.
Now that I'm an adult, I get to make the rules in my house, and we start decorating (inside) after the family birthdays in August. (Outside has to wait because of the Housing Association. We have clearly offended a neighbor over the years, and if we put so much as a skeleton's toe on view before October 1st, the Association hears about it and we get a nasty gram in the mail, sometimes by the next day!)
We have a whole little town that sits on top of the piano. In fact, we've considered getting rid of the piano, because it's old and ugly and hard to keep in tune, but the first thought is always "Where will we put Halloweentown!"
(Then we also have the 847 Nativity sets that go up sometime in November when we transition to Christmas, many of which also go on the piano. They stay there until....it's actually embarrassing to say how long it takes to put the Christmas decorations away. We need a holiday about two weeks after Christmas that has no decorations of its own, but requires a stark, empty house. Maybe we should start celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King Day by REALLY going into mourning? Get I get a show of hands?)
Gonna get a little sad here, it's okay to skip!
Halloween is kind of bittersweet since my bonus niece Alysia passed. We always used to do the holiday up really big, and our families trick-or-treated together. Because of her medical issues, Alysia could never eat any of the candy she got, but she loved dressing up and hustling to each doorbell like all the other kids. Even the last couple of years when she had to take a wheelchair door to door, she was deadly serious about getting as much candy as possible. Then, when we sat down and did the obligatory "poison check" she would make sure we split hers up evenly among the other kids. In return, they'd give her any non-candy items. She must have gotten a zillion toothbrushes over the years from the neighborhood dentist! (At Easter, we filled the eggs with non-edible stuff like erasers, stickers, little toys. They all went crazy the year we ran out of time to shop and just put coins in each egg, that was awesome!) We still spend all the holidays with my bonus sister and mom, and share a few tears, but we have more smiles each year too.
