Halloween Madness

[steuard]

Kim and I had a fun Halloween, though a lot of it came together at the last minute. We started the festivities with a trip to "Halloweekends" at the Cedar Point amusement park in Ohio along with some friends from Alma. Some of the haunted houses there were pretty neat (Club Blood was well done with good atmosphere, and the Toy Factory was alternately creepy and uncomfortably funny). The outdoor "scare zones" weren't so much creepy as they were startling or, um, insulting. (I was followed through part of the "Fright Faire" by a medieval-looking zombie who said that with longer hair I could be one of the Monkees, since I was the whitest thing he'd seen since the moon went behind the clouds.) I'm told Cedar Point has some good roller coasters, too.

The downside of that trip was that we got back mid-afternoon Saturday, and we weren't entirely ready for Halloween yet. We'd done the essentials: Kim had already bought candy, and we carved pumpkins Thursday night:

But I hadn't come up with any sort of costume. (Kim figured she'd just put on her usual Ren Faire outfit.) Happily, I was able to put something together in the last twenty minutes or so before trick-or-treaters showed up, thanks to my dad: he'd sent me a cheesy Einstein wig/mustache kit a few weeks ago, so I dressed up as a goofy professor:

A lot of the minor details aren't visible in that picture: you can see that my shirt is partly untucked and partly caught in my zipper, but it's probably less obvious that the buttons are misaligned and that I've missed several belt loops. I was also wearing mismatched shoes (and mismatched socks). I got to be goofy, too: if kids came to the porch but didn't say "Trick or treat", I'd ask if they had come for class (it's not Halloween if they don't follow the script!), and I made sure to tell everyone to study their physics as they went away.

We were completely taken off guard by the number of trick-or-treaters. Our house is apparently in the very middle of the most popular trick-or-treating spot in the county: kids from the whole region come to our street. We'd been told to expect something like 300-400 kids during the city's official 5:30-7:30 trick-or-treating hours, so Kim bought about 575 pieces of candy to make sure we were safe. We gave them out one at a time, and Kim ran out at 6:38. Seeing the situation, I'd run out to the store a few minutes earlier to resupply; we opened back up at about 6:45, and I'd say we ended up giving candy to about 700 kids by the end of the evening. (We actually gave out more like 775 pieces of candy, but I started doubling up for the last 20-30 minutes when it was clear that the rate of kids was dwindling.)

Comments

[beth_leonard]

Wow! Official trick-or-treat hours? 700 trick-or-treaters?... I guess that's why you need official hours.

We had about 3 groups of 6-10 trick-or-treaters. We took our kids out with a group of 9 kids total from 6:30 to 7:45 or so.

I have way too much costco candy left over.

--Beth

[steuard.livejournal.com]

It seems like all the towns near here have official hours, and the really annoying thing is that they generally run before dark. That means really cool spooky house decorations are less worthwhile: only the tail end of the trick-or-treat crowd will even get to see them. It's admirable as a safety measure (fewer kids crossing streets when it's dangerously hard to see them), but it's disappointing as far as the spirit of the holiday is concerned (at least to me).

We have friends who live just three or four blocks away who only get a few dozen trick-or-treaters each year. Our house just happens to be in a very convenient place: there's about a 3 block by 4 block region of fairly dense houses without any really busy streets to cross. (Many of the residents are pretty well off by local standards, too.) If you live on a farm or in a small rural community, it's just the sort of place you might want to bring your kids to get a good haul pretty efficiently.