Celebrating Dress-Up and Rot-Your-Teeth Day

Since the kids were born, we have gone to our church's fall festival every year we were in town.  This year, each of our kids brought a friend (Gift #789).  Our son brought a friend from school, and our daughter invited a neighborhood friend whose father and little sister also came along.  As usual, there were inflatables, pony rides, bounce houses, climbing walls, face painting, golf, carnival food, and lots of game and prizes for various ages. An inflatable trike race was new this year and was a hit with the boys.

These school friends look a lot like brothers.

My daughter took my camera and snapped this strange photo.  The placement of the flag in the background makes it look like I was puffing smoke.  I guess I can be a bit like a fire breathing dragon at times.

Since we have moved to a new neighborhood this year filled with new neighbors we would like to meet, we decided to take part in trick-or-treating this year as a way to get to know them.  Some of our neighbors make Halloween a huge deal as their yards and homes were decorated elaborately to look like haunted houses.  They also hosted a neighborhood potluck with some of the creepiest foods I have ever seen.  Halloween is a big deal to them.  Our son went trick-or-treating with his friend Ben in Preston, which is a much larger and more expensive community than our little neighborhood with only 29 homes.

Our little pirate and his friend Ben after trick-or-treating

Meanwhile, we attended the neighborhood party, and I gave out candy while my husband took our daughter trick-or-treating with the other neighborhood kids.  It was a blessing to actually get trick-or-treaters this year. (Gift #790)  Our next door neighbors have 3-year-old twins.  When I held out my basket of candy (which held 3 unopened bags and 3 opened bags) for them to pick a few pieces of candy, they each grabbed one of the full size jumbo bags of candy.  Smart boys!  I told them they were welcome to several pieces of candy but that I needed the jumbo bag for the other children who would come by that night.  Their family gave out full size candy bars, and my kids remembered them for it.  While the variety of candy I gave to each kid was the equivalent to a full size candy bar, the kids remember you better if you give our full size bars.

Our neighborhood kids

Trick-or-treaters at our house

I expected my son to collect far more candy since he was gone twice as long and had a larger neighborhood to canvas, but as you can see from this "after" photo, his big sister collected far more candy in our tiny little community.

Left:  Girl's loot in our little community, Right:  Boy's loot in upscale Preston

Over half of our neighbors are from India, so a number of homes were covered in lights that night as they celebrated 'Diwali' , a Festival of Light.  As my precious Christian Indian friend, Preethi, explained, " Diwali is an Indian Hindu festival which is celebrated in a big way in India and here by Hindu people in which they decorate the house with lights and lanterns. They clean the whole house and decorate it and make lots of sweets and do prayers offering all those sweets to their gods and then distribute among friends and family. The light firecrackers at night in belief that goddess of wealth will come to their house as in to welcome the goddess they do lights and also they believe it's an auspicious time to start up a new business or venture or anything new. So it's like Christmas to them."  I'm so thankful to Preethi for teaching me who to relate to our neighbors.