Happy Halloween!

One of my favorite days of the year is here! I love the fall, the changing leaves, the arrival of the rain (yup, I have become an Oregonian!) and the hanging of Halloween Decorations. I swear, I can spend hours in Wal-mart and Target rifling through their decorations, giggling all the way down the aisles. Halloween... time for my true nature to come out and play for a few weeks. And luckily this year, Little Calvin is getting just as into it as I am, helping and scheming with me for every step... My wife typically ends the month of October with extra strong eyeballs, with the amount of rolling they do this month. Halloween... must be a "boy thing".

Halloween is also the time of many family traditions. For one, On October 1st, the house MUST be decorated (and note to others... putting up decorations prior to October 1st is just tacky, wrong and against the rules of the universe... DON'T DO IT!) For us, this means covering the outside of the house in lights.. Just like at Chirstmas time, but instead of bright white lights, it's little purple ones, casting the place in an eerie glow. Even Little Calvin's outside play structure got the lights treatment, something new for this year. Inside, it's skull candelabras, creepy candles, spooky pictures in place of our normal decorative art, and all manor of decorations, in every corner possible. New this year: "Old Batty" a decorative skeleton, named by Little Calvin after we decided he couldn't name it after his brother, a new series of "bloody hands" decorations, one of which is placed in the rear window of my car, looking like someone covered their hands in thick blood and pressed them to the window (very cool!) and a fog machine, which by the way, does set off the smoke alarms in the house when fired in close proximity to them.. eh... not that I would have discovered first hand... eh.... Anyhoo..

Next, you must go to the pumpkin patch. Luckily, right down the road a few miles we have the world's best pumpkin patch. At the patch we had to spend an hour getting lost in a huge corn maze (see more here) and then taking the horse drawn hay ride out to pick our pumpkins. The rule of thumb in our house: you can only pick a pumpkin that you can actually carry, and no, it doesn't matter how much you beg or cry... you carry your own! This keeps the size of the pumpkin in step with that the kids can actually carve at each age and prevents us from getting overboard in our pumpkin picking as they look a lot bigger sitting on the table at home than sitting in the patch!

Once all the decorations have been hung, pumpkins found and carved, with Halloween drawing close.. it's time for: Halloween lunch! This is typically held on the Sunday falling closest to Halloween. Halloween lunch is something that I do.. simply because I can, because it's cool, because it freaks the kids out and is fun. The concept is simple... cook with ample amounts of food coloring!

Take this year for example... For lunch we had grilled tuna sandwiches and milk. Now, when grilling you simply butter the outside of the bread prior to putting it on the grill. BUT, if you mix that butter with hefty amounts of green food coloring prior to spreading it on the bread... well, then it suddenly looks as though you have a hefty mold problem. Take it one step further... Take your tuna fish mix, and make it a sickly purple color, and you have a GREAT halloween lunch! It taste's perfectly normal.. but boy does it look disgusting! Other things to try... put colors into your Mac and Cheese or Hamburger Helper as it cooks... tapping into that inner artist as you create the sickest possible color combinations. Trust me, it's fun and your kids think you have lost your mind! (Which may be true!)

Now comes the big day! The costumes come out and it's time to have our scary fun! This year, Amanda dressed up as a zombie, tyler as a mummy and Little Calvin as a pirate. Tonight, we went trick or treating and to our church's chili feed/trunck-or-treat party, thus giving us a lot of candy!! It'll take months to get through all of this.

Now comes the depressing part... tomorrow, I have to take it all down as I eagerly await getting it all back out in another 11 months. Oh well, in just a few weeks, I can go "Psycho Clark Griswald" on my house, when it is time to pull out the Christmas decorations.

Happy Halloween!